Opening: Thu, 08.05.2025, 7pm

Duration: Fri, 09.05. – Sat, 17.05.2025

Performances:

Thu, 08.05.2025, 8pm

Wed, 14.05.2025, 6pm

Artists: andrea ancira, Tekla Aslanishvili, Caitlin Berrigan, Mustafa Emin Büyükcoşkun, Gris García, Pille-Riin Jaik, Izidora I LETHE, Yen Noh, Vrishali Purandare, Emily Sarsam, Olia Sosnovskaya, Olga Zovskaya

Curators: andrea ancira, Gris García, Yen Noh, Vrishali Purandare and Olga Zovskaya, with support by Laura Birschitzky 

What is the basis of solidarity? The answer is usually: empathy – our ability to put ourselves in the shoes of others. But what if this answer falls short? What if empathy not only fails to enable solidarity, but actually undermines its potential?

The group exhibition Leakage, Breaching, Motley Tongues challenges the liberal model of solidarity based on empathy and identification. Building on the concept of “imperfect solidarities” by theorist and art critic Aruna D'Souza, it focuses on what supposedly stands in the way of the realization of solidarity: Difference, dissent, incomprehension. The thesis: solidarity begins where mutual understanding ends – and yet one is willing to care for and with each other.  

How can divergence be made politically productive? How does one rethink and practice solidarity beyond unity? Leakage, Breaching, Motley Tongues engages with these questions through various formal and conceptual artistic strategies.

Curatorial statement:

“Leakage, Breaching, Motley Tongues explores ways to practice solidarities at a moment when existing organizational models for liberatory alliance are tested by surging waves of racial capitalism, (post)colonial necropolitics, and neo-fascism. In a world shaken by these forces, liberalism can appear as a refuge—an alternative that promises freedom, equality, and human rights. However, from critical perspectives across queer, decolonial, and feminist thought, this promise begins to unravel. Liberalism’s language of individual rights and empathy can obscure the systems of violence it quietly sustains: the dispossession at its foundations, the selective inclusion it permits, and the structural inequalities it leaves untouched. Can we look beyond the assurance of liberal consensus toward deeper, more radical possibilities for collective alliance? Can we resist liberalism’s desire for solidarity based on empathy and understanding, and instead, engage in contradiction, mistranslation, and incomprehension as generative forms to reshape solidarities? If so, what politics would emerge? The exhibition envisions this movement.

Leakage, Breaching, Motley Tongues draws on Aruna D’Souza’s framing of ‘imperfect solidarities,’ which embraces incomprehension as a possibility for political alliance. While empathy and mutual understanding are often seen as positive traits and foundational elements of solidarity, they can inadvertently become homogenizing forces, tied to ideals of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusivity’ that overlook deeper, unresolved tensions. At its worst, empathy-based solidarity can even bolster neo-fascist ideologies, masking their harmful effects. Alongside Amitav Ghosh and Édouard Glissant, D’Souza asks whether solidarity can emerge based on linguistic and cultural opacity. Dwelling in incomprehensibility offers an alternative that creates the potential to preserve differences and enable solidarity beyond unity. It opens up a space for leakage, breaching, and motley tongues—giving way to new relationalities within difference."  

(andrea ancira, Gris García, Yen Noh, Vrishali Purandare, Olga Zovskaya)

PhD-in-Practice Program: Leakage, Breaching, Motley Tongues is a cooperation between Kunstraum Niederoesterreich and the PhD-in-Practice program of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.