We Begin To Seek Out…

24.06.2022 - 09.07.2022

A group exhibition featuring works by Ahlam Shibli, Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu, Milena Bonilla, Rubiane Maia, SAP LAB (Paz Ortúzar and Lucy Cordes Engelman) with Bernardita Bennett

Opening on Friday, the 24th of June, from 19:00 to 22:00

Performances by SAP LAB on Saturday, the 25th of June, at 11:30 and 21:15

While the words dirt and soil are often used synonymously, soil implies a depth in content that dirt seems somehow to lack. Dirt, meanwhile, evokes an unseemliness that describes words of insult or behaviors of indelicacy. A popular gardening website, for instance, differentiates the two as follows: soil is the substance that makes plants grow, dirt is what we get on our clothes and under our fingernails. In other words, whatever makes up the thin layer of stuff that covers our planet, upon which our towns, cities, and lives are built, into which our dead are buried, soil is good, dirt is bad, even though its material constitution may all be the same — a composite of decaying matter. 

Perhaps because of all its implied virtues, soil has famously been co-opted into nationalist and xenophobic rhetorics, as if soil itself can bespeak whatever arbitrary characteristics a border inscribes. This exhibition is thus organized in defense of dirt. It brings together seven artists who give language to this defense through photography, performance, video, and textual intervention. The artists in the exhibition all live and work in Europe, having emigrated from different parts of the world. In a place that had notoriously called upon soil to exercise politics of intolerance, and still uses dirt as a denigration in broad, bigoted strokes, this exhibition is not just a defense of dirt, but also a rejection of the pristine, the mythology of immutable landscapes and nostalgic natures.

On the occasion of SAP Space’s inaugural exhibition, we begin a series of beginnings — beginnings born out of rewrites and excerpts, impulsive starts and productive failures, private ruminations and political urgencies — all the messy processes that dirty our hands and soil our clothes. The object of what “we” seek is intentionally imprecise and slippery, because the material in question — some call it soil, some call it dirt, some call it decay — is meaningful precisely because it is ever-changing.

— Text by Ilyn Wong