[im] no-longer-being-able-to-be-able - Virtual Exhibition on Skelf curated by Hang Li

[Judit]

https://www.skelf.org.uk

Artists:
Babeworld (Ashleigh Williams), Meech Boakye, Joshua Citarella, DANK
Collective (Grant Bingham, Tori Carr, James D. Hopkins, Ian Williamson, and
Zen Khalid), DIRD (Zijing Zhao and Rui Shi), Emma Finn, Anna Frijstein, Max
Grau, Mina Heydari-Waite, Sae Yeoun Hwang, Judit Kis, Simona Me., Donatella
Della Ratta, Frankie Roberts, Geraldine Snell

no-longer-being-able-to-be-able began from an urge to think about a shared
unease in an over-saturated contemporary life. The limitless productivity
and growth encouraged by neoliberal ideology have redefined people as
labourers who have to continue to able to work and consume in order to be
able to be.

The title of the project refers to Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society
(2010), which interrogates contemporary life’s immanent excessive
positivity and information. In such a society, everybody becomes an
entrepreneur fully responsible for the outcomes of their ‘individual’
lives. In order to be responsible in this sense, people are so busy proving
they are able to work, compete, consume and survive. It becomes hard to
hold on and ask why we should be able to be able, and for the sake of whom.
The predominating fantasies of unlimited growth have rendered feelings of
tiredness, anxiety and disorientation daunting and negative. They become
symptoms of being fragile, defective and incompetent. These ‘negativities’
have promoted the contemporary myths of health, care, safety and
protection. The pandemic, once seen as a chance to suspend and contest
these myths, is instead fuel for the continuation of ‘the normal' in both
the art field and wider society.

In response to the neoliberal norm of being-able-to-be-able,
no-longer-being-able-to-be-able explores the unease in excessive everyday
life from the perspective of labourer, consumer, woman, Queer individual,
ethnic minority, teenager, internet user, art worker and an exhausted
‘regular person’. By unpacking the culture of abundance and expansion, this
project questions the meaning of be and being able that are underpinned by
particular ideologies, powerholders and histories. The works presented in
the project aim to explore the possible ways of recognition, articulation
and interrogation amid overloaded, oversaturated, and overdrawn beings.
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