What Happens to Us

16/11/2016

Communities don’t just happen, they’re made.

What Happens to Us will examine democracy as a system of community formation. This exhibitionary programme unfolds at Wimbledon Space in Autumn 2016, in the long shadow of UK’s EU referendum of 27 June, with the suspension of Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff and the shock and awe of the US election on 8 November. The news of Trump leading the so-called free world has compelled many of us to wonder if we should ‘just say no’ to democracy in its current form. What if the philosopher and diplomat Joseph de Maistre was right: People get the governments they deserve. What does this mean to us in the UK? This is something that What Happens to Us aims to address as a meeting place for a democratically charged community. Together we’ll grapple with the reality that a properly political horizon may be little more than a mirage in our age of post-ideological politics. More importantly, we’ll try and figure out what to do if in fact this is so.

Confirmed contributors: Acts of Searching Closely, Alison Green, Barbara Steveni, Brad Butler, Binita Walia, Carla Cruz, Cinzia Cremona, Francesca Baglietto, Georgia Brown, Helen Brewer, Ian Solomon-Kawall, Jennet Thomas, Karem Ibrahim, Marc Herbst, Mike Freedman, Naomi Garriock, Neil Cummings, Pangaea Sculptors’ Centre, Pippa Koszerek, radical reThink, Rosie McGinn, Scott Schwager, Wright & Vandame, others TBC.

+ Cinzia Cremona, Elliott Burns, Francesca Baglietto and Gabriele Grigorjeva as the exhibition’s shadow curators

What Happens to Us is curated by Marsha Bradfield and Amy McDonnell.

The four-phase exhibition runs 15 Nov to 9 Dec 10 – 4 @ Wimbledon Space – Wimbledon College of Arts, Merton Hall Road London SW19 3QA