Who Wants to Live in a World Without Magic?

Using intimate, poetic, and speculative narratives and methods, the participating artists weave in spells that bring magical worldviews alive. Here, magic is used as a tool in an ongoing exploration reaching far beyond simple definitions of the term itself, manifesting in different vocabularies, material traces, and through sound and music. Working across pasts, futures, and presents, the artists highlight the power of critical imagination, energy transference, and acts of ritualisation. While they vary in foregrounding autobiographical elements, local and diasporic imaginaries, or spellbinding fabulations, the works in the exhibition and events programme overlap and resonate in an offering of transformative standpoints wherein binary worldviews become obsolete. Reckoning with what has been lost through hundreds of years of extractivist logics, some works propose ways of collectively refiguring and repositioning hegemonic historical and scientific narratives. Others propose that although loss, suffering, and deprivation might not magically end, we can alchemically recycle them to make new growth possible. Together, they invite us on a multi-sensorial meander to experience what non-hegemonic and less individualistic forms of mourning and healing can look, feel, or sound like.

CACHE/SPIRIT, by electronic music duo Animistic Beliefs (Marvin Lalihatu and Linh Luu) and multimedia artist Jeisson Drenth, departs from locally situated questions around heritage and displacement, ancestral wounds, and subjectivity in the digital age. In their multi-sensory installation, they synthesise a blend of immersive vocabularies, sounds, and modes of listening that are simultaneously meditative, challenging, and thought-provoking. The installation by Animistic Beliefs and Jeisson Drenth is only on view 10 September – 17 October.

Natalia Sorzano’s Contesting Madness likewise emerged from situated and local conversations. Rooted in exchanges with spiritual teachers and people from different cultural backgrounds in Rotterdam, the installation unfolds ways in which mourning and healing take form in liminal spaces outside of dominant and colonial “scientific” perceptions of mental health and illness.

In Mehraneh Atashi’s Seeding My Feet in the Chant of Bells, a garden of black-eyed peas evokes a subjective and poetic form of animism through the shadowy presence of a gardener. The seeds, carrying histories of migration, now re-rooted in local soil, hold memories. Growing among the vibrations of our planetary hum, they connect to larger ecosystems of death and renewal.

Anna Hoetjes’s The Dust of Venus comprises ten clay disks, containing the same chemical composition as our blazing sister planet Venus. The disks are inscribed with references to ancient star maps. The ceramic glaze applied to the tiles of Aphrodite Terra references the spectroscopic techniques used for analysing starlight by early female space pioneers.