Image © Richard George, Oyster, 2011.

SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art presents from April 30 to July 09, 2016, a group exhibition entitled Does the oyster sleep?.

While politics is perhaps antagonistic to love – in its conflict between common interest and individual desire – political action has a realm that indisputably communicates with Eros. Political action in relationship to Eros could be understood as a common desire to live differently in a world that would be more equal, with different relationships between humans, land and property, based on care, solidarity and community.

The exhibition Does the oyster sleep? probes the role of Eros in politics. If Eros tears the subject away from itself, toward the other, it enables the potential for an opening up toward the outside of Modernity.

Does the oyster sleep? takes its title from a passage in Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva, in which the author draws the image of the ‘living it’ of the contorting oyster, when dripped with lemon juice. For Lispector, the image serves as metaphor of transcendence within the self: the lemon causes a tearing of the oyster from its root, bringing to it both anxiety and living transcendence, exposing the depths of the self, the “it” within.

Featured in the show are works by Sophie Bissonnette / Martin Duckworth / Joyce Rock, Maja Borg, Marguerite Duras, Sara Eliassen, Silvia Gruner and Waël Noureddine that encompass a range of moving-image formats, from experimental film and video, to documentary. The works address zones of relationality from an array of perspectives and different areas of human experience: Eros and politics, the gaze and self-love, self-destruction and hope, the politics of labour and care, the sensible and alienation, setting forth the bright and dark side of the “it” of the oyster.

Guided tours on Wednesdays and Saturdays from 2 pm - 4 pmThis exhibition is part of SBC’s focus program ÁGUA VIVA.