Pavilion of Montenegro

The Art of Holding Hands

As we break through the sedimentary cloud

The Art of Holding Hands / as we break through the sedimentary cloud resembles a sci-fi tale of possible futures, weaving through the intergenerational, multitemporal views of artists from various social and historical contexts and settling in present-day Montenegro.

On this piece of Earth where wounded landscapes are breathtaking, that has been suffering from a broken heart for three decades, the future has already happened. We think about it through memories and explore its ruins and archives. This story originates on the margins of the “world”, which we now call global capitalism, from the space of acute dystopia of the disintegrated “body” (of society, nation, nature) which changes under constant turbulence, influences, and shock; it loses its solid membrane and, like a scattered cloud of ideologies, events, images, fears, and dreams, it floats in time and space.

Embodying their visions through various media, from painting and installation to adopting ritual approaches to handicrafts in their practices, all the way to poetry and archives, the artists show us imagination, the healing potential of art that is conceived in, and despite, the postsocial desert. These artists absorb experiences and images of the world and the environment, in which they create and build alternative realities and personal cosmologies, but also acknowledge the possible outcomes of the anxiety produced by the grey present.

This sedimentary cloud with its floating landscapes, documents, futures, loves, histories, and even people is detached from the tissues of a collective body that is constantly disintegrating; it can be seen as hopeless chaos and darkness, a constant source of anxiety and pessimism. Let us use this as an opportunity to rid ourselves of algorithms and competition, and weave new connections between actors and elements, exercise the possibility of a new language and imagine a new beginning.

The experience of the exhibition envelops and weaves a whole record of experimental poetic text, leading us with the help of audio guides, through the projection of possible futures, broadcast by encounters of artistic visions networked in the exhibition body.