Re-enchantment brings together ten artists whose works explore ways of re-enchanting the world.

Bianca Bondi, Shuyi Cao,
Dorota Gawęda & Eglė Kulbokaitė, Olga Grotova, Angelika Loderer, Manuel Mathieu, Wanda Mihuleac, Teresa Pągowska, Ariana Papademetropoulos

Curator: Oona Doyle

The term re-enchantment, which is increasingly present in the cultural landscape, is opposed to the idea of disenchantment. In the aftermath of the First World War, the sociologist Max Weber described this phenomenon as the result of a process of ‘rationalisation’ inherent to modernity, by which reality becomes objectifiable. While enchantment means falling under the spell of magical influences, re-enchantment involves an act of repairing the world through wonder, and suggests a new ethic that reconnects with a sense of mystery. The exhibition responds to a reality that is often felt as demystified and damaged by the ecological crisis and by hyper-rationalisation.

In the context of this exhibition, re-enchantment is to be understood in the magical sense, but also in a political and ecological sense. For philosopher Silvia Federici, re-enchanting the world implies ‘reconstructing our lives around and with others including animals, waters, plants’.

The artists on view tend towards re-enchanting the world by imbuing reality with imagination and by collaborating with living matter rather than instru- mentalising it. Magic is a tool that defamiliarises the everyday. By moving away from a linear perspective and favouring multidimensional viewpoints, the artists strive to reinvent our relationship with the reality that surrounds us. Some artists invert the hierarchy between landscape and figure ; others merge human figures with the animal, mineral and plant realms. Some artists give free rein to the transformative power of materials which evolve over the course of the exhibition. Through these images and processes, they counter an anthropocentric view and blur the boundaries between human and non-human. The distinction between dreams and reality is also softened by works that juxtapose both a realistic and a dreamlike dimension.