Light In The Age of Darkness

Darren Bader, Elisabetta Benassi, Mike Bouchet, Sarah Braman, Roe Ethridge, Sam Falls, Piero Golia, Christian Holstad, Gabriel Kuri, Oliver Payne, Amalia Pica, Stephen G. Rhodes, Amanda Ross-Ho, Sterling Ruby, Slavs and Tatars, Frances Stark, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Charlie White

Depart Foundation is pleased to present Light In The Age of Darkness, a group exhibition featuring works made in the past decade by 17 international, critically acclaimed artists.

As Depart Foundation looks forward to commemorating the 10th anniversary of its founding in Rome in 2009, Light In The Age of Darkness explores the broader themes of identity, language, and communication emerging in a moment of shifting socio-political and cultural landscapes. The works produced in the infancy of this millennium that set out with culturally heterogeneous ambitions, are now heightened under the threat of cultural contraction, and remind us of the implicitly global injunction of the Artist to interrogate culture across borders.

The selection by international artists from Argentina, Canada, Ethiopia, Germany, Italy, Mexico, the UK and the U.S. includes significant paintings, photography, works on paper, sculpture, installation and video. Produced between 2007 and 2014, the works in Light In The Age of Darkness bookend the most significant modern, economic collapse to date since the Great Depression in America, followed by the end of the Bush administration and the more hopeful beginnings of Obama's 'change' era. Viewed in hindsight, the works in this show could be said to have foreseen the current socio- political climate. In their shared anti-populist emphasis on expansive rather than isolationist ideas, they manifest a desire to explore cultural connectivity and confluence in place of divisive demarcation.

Many of these artists came of age in the 90s, an era defined by the early onset of globalism, multiculturalism, and increased informational access. Relational and intertextual frameworks came to the fore in art production, encouraging a kind of optimistic cultural relativism and a rigorous conceptual turn in spite of its often dystopian expression. The works in Light in The Age of Darkness focus on the productive elisions and excesses of language and communication, as well as on shifting conceptions of personal, civic, and global identity in an increasingly disembodied, digital age. These works propose ambivalent metaphors rather than prescriptive maxims as ways to navigate our increasingly complex cultural moment.