The place we do not know is the place we are looking for is composed of an exhibition and discursive program developed by Liquid Architecture (Naarm/Melbourne) and Sarai-CSDS (Delhi, India) and presented at West Space.
1st Feb – 29th March 2025
West Space, Collingwood Arts Precinct
The exhibition brings together artists from across Australia and South Asia exploring the techniques and tools we use to pin down and understand our world.
The place we do not know is the place we are looking for interrogates modernity’s relationship with calculability, quantifiability, and causality, attuning to excesses that cannot be rationally explained by the scientific measurement and technological systems.
Here, the artists consider limits, fragility, porosities, and what it means to speak in languages that poke holes in a world preoccupied with capture, control, and determinacy.
This project takes its title from an essay by philosopher and activist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi that calls out to us, here and now:
This place we don’t know is the place we are looking for, in a social environment that has been impoverished by social precariousness, in a landscape that has been desertified. It is the place that will be able to warm the sensible sphere that has been deprived of the joy of singularity. It is the place of occupation, where movements are gathering…
Taking this proposition and Bifo’s notions of the poetic as departure points, the curatorial framework engages with practices that foreground and reactivate sites of erasure and closure, alienation and automation. These sites become scenes to be tenaciously reconfigured by the artists as potential grounds for the emergence of new poetics and relationalities.
Curated by Laura McLean and Suvani Suri.
Featuring artists: Priyanka Chhabra, Fileona Dkhar, Merve Ertufan & Mochu, Merv Espina, Uzma Falak, Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker, Alana Hunt, Shareeka Helaluddin, Aarti Jadu & Claire de Carteret, Rahee Punyashloka, Hayden Ryan, Thomas Smith, Joel Sherwood Spring, Aarti Sunder.
