The title of this year’s graduation exhibition refers to Iraqi author Nazik al‑Mala’ika (1923 – 2007). Her poem Revolt Against the Sun (Thawra `ala al-shams) was published in 1947, and in 2020 an English anthology with the same title was released featuring 32 of her key poems, spanning over decades of her work. In the oeuvre of Nazik al‑Mala’ikaRevolt Against the Sun means a revolt against imposed meaning, dominance, and inadvertently established conformity. There is no common subject that unites the exhibition as such, but the fact that all the works created by the participating artists—third-year bachelor and second-year master—embody a will to address the current states of our minds and bodies. All are concerned with how we can deal with the deep turbulences caused by war, climate crisis, inequality, digital alienation, identity fragmentation, and chronic anxiety. Can art offer some solace in this situation? Can we regain a sense of the self that can defy and contest the notions of the self constantly proposed by social media or the mainstream discourses on automated labor and the tasks machines are going to take away from us? Can art contribute to regaining peace?

What is interesting is that no sadness or sense of defeat runs through the exhibition and the works. From the current misery, artists and their artistic practices emerged not joyful but sober, able to face the trouble and invest in the different works as ways of gaining insight on some important issues:

- Emotions circulate through our bodies; we carry those emotions and share them, even without noticing them. Therefore, it seems fundamental to circulate positive emotions and experiences of hope that may motivate change.

- We need to move beyond the Modernist and colonial ideas of the individual human. Our bodies are not isolated and also not entirely passive. Technology is not there to shape us, we are also there to shape, modify, and adapt it to our current needs and values.

- Trauma, pain, and mental health are not only personal circumstances but ways of dealing with overwhelming processes that affect all of us as a group, community, and society.

- Also, art and artistic practice offer an incredible counterbalance to the toxic positivity of privately owned media. Art still embodies the common good, the public realm, the arena where we can openly discuss the future of our worlds.

The works presented in Revolt Against the Sun! are very different in the artistic languages used. The Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW does not encourage a single way of working, but the development of an eloquent and unique tongue in each case. What is fundamental to understand is the effort these young artists have undertaken in producing these new works: their trust in the democratic guarantees that define art as a right, a fundamental right that enhances our lives and our possibilities of reconnection to the collective spirit, opening pre-political spaces for thought and healthy dissent.

We extend our gratitude to the team of the Kunsthaus Baselland for the collaboration and for hosting our graduation exhibition for the tenth time. We would also like to thank the team of the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW—lecturers, mentors, technical, scientific, administrative, and production staff—for their guidance and engagement, and, last but not least, we thank all artists for their brilliant works, their trust in us and themselves, and the continuous exchange.

Chus Martínez

In a Nutshell

The day before my first meeting with the students of the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW, someone put a card on my desk with a picture of Yok Yok, a character by Swiss illustrator Etienne Delessert who has the peculiarity of living in a nutshell. An ingenious choice to take up residence in a shell that is both complex and solid, discreet and mobile, so I arrived in Basel accompanied.

In the course of my encounters with the students, this nutshell became a philosophical motif and a transitional object that enabled each practice to be considered in its uniqueness, while developing a common territory, that of a group exhibition. This basic walnut shell, familiar to many, has thus become the receptacle for almost 50 original worlds, for many delightful artistic practices. I could tell you how these artists are writing new personal narratives, creating new compact spaces to live in and places to exist collectively in an increasingly violent, ecocidal, and patriarchal world. I could describe the ways in which they fight and assert a thought, convey an emotion, and share a feeling at a time when everything is collapsing: justice, the common good, our very humanity. I could mention the humor, the joy, the fear, and the distress that colored the rapid exchanges with each and every one of them. I could tell you about a dolphin rodeo and monoliths of memories, trapped bodies and turtles holding precious stones, houses on fire and trees made of wax, fabric merry-go-rounds, false identities and objects that reassure, national archives and collective utopias and surfaces made of buttons... In the end, I could spend hours writing about each of these furtive encounters.

But I must, succinctly, invite you to live, for a few seconds or whole hours, in each of the nutshells that I have been given to discover so that you too can imagine a present filled with different worlds, filled with multiple and unique nutshells at the same time. This invitation is not just cordial, it’s almost like an injunction. Because now it’s a question of not forgetting, of remembering certain warnings, certain pieces of advice, certain answers had a shape, and were to be found, together, at the same time and space. In a nutshell, they all belong to the same exhibition.

Margaux Bonopera