3/7/21

Every joke is a tiny revolution.
George Orwell

Embedded in manic laughter is a cry for help, a face perpetually contorted into the laugh-cry emoji. Selected as the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year couple of years ago, 😂 was apparently the most used ‘word’ globally. Originally called ‘Face with Tears of Joy’, 😂 has quickly evolved to inhabit deeper complexities, encompassing helplessness, embarrassment, incompetence. Are the tears the result of unhinged laughter; or is laughter a front for bitter tears? HahahAhAHahahahahaHALP!

Humor is specific in its time and space; what makes us laugh reveals a lot about our immediacy, and the world here and now. It also reflects on the evolution of our cultures and endures in its infinite forms: satire, slapstick, irony, parody, memes and so on. Inheriting the nature of humour, Only a Joke Can Save Us is a complex, varied and rebellious account of our current times.

With this exhibition, we wish to explore humour as a way of understanding or questioning ourselves in an ever more unsettling world — our desires, fantasies, frustrations and resistance, riffing off everything from the familiar to the absurd.

Featuring ridiculed political figures, the banality of pigeons, dancing in a flood, playful instagram filters and more, these artworks will elicit laughter and offer comfort in bleakness; but also irreverently disrupt and transgress, creating radical resistance in times of uncertainty. Confronted by crisis and trauma, joking and laughing becomes a methodology to explore new conceptions of solidarity, critique and justice.

(PS. Apparently, 😂 is already going out of fashion. Gen Z-ers have instead replaced the ambiguous laugh-cry with a uber-direct, zeitgeisty 💀, a skull as in ‘I’m dead’.  After all, the youngest gets the last laugh.)