Rising out of crisis, Enduring Time | Material Emergence brings together artists from Western and Central Asia with the Balkans. Humans from this highly politicized geographic space recognize the disappearance of meaning, erasures of citizenships, exiles of people, and the mined landscape as a reality with which one must reckon. 

Now, as we doubly resist a global pandemic and the targeted dehumanization of communities based on race, our slowly unfurling existential crisis becomes universally felt. Thus, to reclaim our global contemporary moment, we turn to the resilient practices of artists who have witnessed their worlds collapse. 

Using material culture, as both historical form and laborious process, Bulnygin’s sunflower seed sculptures incorporating Soviet-era furnitures and Demirkoparan’s algorithmically disbursed kilim paintings take the past and hurl it into a future exposing the pure potentiality of our fractured present. 

The intimacy of manual labor in various iterations, including paintings, textiles, or objects generates a new durational relationship to materiality. By capturing the force of labor through material expression, this exhibition works against the volatile relationship with time premised on the frailty of lived experience. Resilience is the primary radical act that  intervenes in social and political history through tenacious endurance. We thus present an arresting display of material that is at once intimately perceptive and rigorously expository.