OPENING: Friday July 12th 17.00-19.00
Opening speech: 17.30
Exhibition period July 13th to July 21 th 2024
Open daily between 13.00-17.00 (closed on Mondays)
WG Kunst
Marius van Bouwdijk Bastiaansestraat 28
1054 SP Amsterdam
www.wgkunst.nl | wgkunst@wgkunst.nl | 020 6161515
The closing event: public discussion at 15:00 on 21th July
How often do phrases such as “don’t cry” or “keep smiling” go out of place or are opposite, making us feel better? As a starting point of Anna Kahiani’s artistic research, she refers to speech patterns and recognizable phrases in situations that require empathy based on recurring situations that happen to refugees and migrants.
Kakhiani intentionally refers to emotional and physical sensations as reactions to such phrases and translates them into sensory and visual forms in installations and objects using familiar items, materials and images from everyday life. Expanding the range of reflections on language as an instrument of mutual understanding and sensitivity, limits of openness, she refers to some historical moments and pseudo-scientific facts, expanding the scope of the context.
The exhibition Hug Me with Words, or Maybe Not is a reaction to the present, which is oversaturated with triggers, and an attempt to appeal to basic intuitive feelings and remember what it is like to rely on them. It is an attempt to explore the limits of empathy in a multicultural environment through the universality of language. The exhibition will feature installations, objects and a space for the public to interact. A public discussion will be held as a closing event. Updates to the public program will be posted on the website of WG Kunst and the artist’s website.
The project is supported by the Dutch Foundation for Literature, the Support Fund for Ukrainian Makers, VATAHA Foundation.
Anna Kakhiani (1991, Ukraine) is an interdisciplinary artist, her current practice is based on interconnections between mental states and physical experience, uncertainties in empathy, and processing forced transformations. Since 2022, she has been living and working in Amsterdam after being forced to move to the Netherlands due to Russian aggression against Ukraine.
Website https://www.annakakhiani.com/
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/annakakhiani