Róza El-Hassan / Martha Rosler. Future's Dialect

Curated by Isabel Halene
Supported by Erna Hecey, Luxembourg/Brussels

Resistance against war, violence and oppression.
Two artists, two generations, two cultures, one theme.

Róza El-Hassan (Budapest) and Martha Rosler (Brooklyn) are two conceptual artists who refuse to accept that people live in inhumane conditions. They are exhibiting their work together for the first time at Kunst Raum Riehen.

The title of the exhibition Future's Dialect is borrowed from a text and exhibition concept by El-Hassan from 2014. In this poignant vision, El-Hassan links archaic Syrian earth dome buildings with utopian content, such as escaping into space and building settlements from moon dome buildings, as proposed to NASA by the Iranian-American architect Nader Khalili in the 1980s. Future's Dialect was chosen as an anticipatory, hopeful but also critical title for this first joint exhibition, in which the artists combine works that depict various moments of social crises, military conflicts, humanitarian tragedies, but also responses of artistic solidarity.

Martha Rosler has been one of the outstanding personalities of contemporary art for decades, with works primarily on the relationship between social life and the public sphere. She explores activist positions in feminism, anti-war and human rights movements. Rosler's perspective is represented by her photomontages and the archive of her groundbreaking project If you lived here... on housing and homelessness, which was first exhibited at the Dia Art Foundation in New York in 1989. In 2004 and then again in 2008, Rosler returned to one of her most famous photomontage series in the wake of the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan: House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home. She takes the viewer into sophisticated living spaces, merging the highly styled interiors with elements of the reality of war and its representation in the mass media.

Róza El-Hassan has conducted a comprehensive investigation into archaic methods and forms of Syrian architecture in recent years. She opens a new chapter in her committed human rights activism and social critique by combining in her artistic vision the millennia-old tradition of ecologically based, authentic Arab vernacular architecture with proposals for a feasible and sustainable solution to alleviate the humanitarian crisis caused by the Syrian war and to rebuild the razed cities.

The drawings, sketches, sculptures, architectural models and installations with the titles Breeze and Architecture of Compassion illustrate El-Hassan's great willingness to experiment in the search for radical solutions for the hoped-for reconstruction in Syria. In doing so, she re-evaluates traditional materials and technologies in the light of ecological approaches and an awareness of sustainability.

As different as the works of these two artists may be, at their core they touch on one question: What can the individual achieve in the face of war and devastation? In the exhibition, criticism meets complaint. Confrontation meets hope.

Text: Barnabás Bencsik, Isabel Halene