E-Flux.com
Curator: Mei Huang
“The title Silent Narratives was taken from Chaim Potok’s novel The Chosen, in which he describes: ‘I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own,’” explains Mei Huang in an interview about her curated exhibition Silent Narratives. The exhibition displays the archive of ancient artifacts of the Silk Road in the same space as the contemporary works of 25 artists from various countries along its route, such as China, Iraq, Israel, Iran, Palestine and Lebanon. Silent Narratives makes the cultural and historical exchanges possible between ancient and modern work silently, ignoring the limitations of time and space. As Roberto Mangabeira Unge has stated in The Self Awakened: “Any social theory that would escape the illusions of false necessity without surrendering to the fantasies of an unrestrained utopianism must make sense of this clash between the self-fulfilling prophecies and the recalcitrant facts.” Silent Narratives is not only related to the past, but also takes the present into account, creating narratives among the different struggles faced by the existing societies along its path. Hence, the ancient Silk Road is just an introduction, which invites us to view the world from the perspectives of the history, culture and politics of globalization.
https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/270567/silent-narratives/