This exhibition originates from an invitation extended by the board of the Universitätsgalerie der Angewandten to Bouchra Khalili, visual artist, Professor, and head of Artistic Strategies at die Angewandte. Khalili responded to the invitation with a collaborative curatorial platform activated during a seminar she taught this last winter semester with participants from various departments across the University. The curatorial platform engaged attendees of the seminar, as well as lecturers of the department of Artistic Strategies, and resulted in this exhibition that explores questions on ecology, gender, suppressed histories, collective memory, persistence, and the power of storytelling. The eleven artists in this exhibition manifest these investigations in their selected work inviting us to vividly envision other potential worlds.

On a November eve in 1990, Etel Adnan wrote “The weather is uncertain tonight, as is my soul.” Adnan’s writing in the book Of Cities & Women (Letters to Fawwaz) searches for the fragments of her plural identities. In letters sent to Fawwaz Traboulsi (historian and editor of Zawaya who commissioned Adnan to write an essay on feminism for a special issue on “Arab Women”), Adnan responded with observations throughout a journey that took her to Barcelona, Aix-en-Provence, Skopelos, Murcia, Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, and Beirut. In her poignant letters, Adnan contemplates gender, geography, culture, war, and even death. These contemplations lead her to investigate her own positioning as a woman artist, articulating this in the intimate and existential “Who I am, what I am good for, into what kind of an order do I fit, for what purpose I act, what road I must take?”, these crucial inquiries of purpose, responsibility, and engagement are as relevant today as they were then.

The weather is uncertain tonight, as is my soul, brings together several positions echoing Adnan’s questions, from Yael Bartana’s Two Minutes to Midnight and her ‘pre-enactment’ of a fictional nation led by women, to Sharon Hayes’ investigation of the plurality of genders – these works lead us to recognize the spectrum within which gender and sexuality reside. Laure Prouvost’s playful video sculptures and tapestry discreetly invite us to dive into storytelling as a method for collective fabulation and worlding.

Otobong Nganka and Rossella Biscotti, in the meantime, encourage us to deal with the colonial genealogy of the exploitation of natural resources and their current extinction, asking us “what is our collective future?“.

Yto Barrada looks into the narrative power of play, poetry, and humor, to reimagine oneself, with her mother Mounira’s participation in the tour of the United States organized by the “African Youth Leadership Program” in 1966 as a starting point, during a time hopeful for decolonization and a promising equity in cultural exchanges. Lamia Joreige also looks into the power of narration, though here, in relation to history and the impossible construction of a colle­ctive memory of the civil wars in Lebanon (1975–1990).

This quest for answers is what constitutes the artistic strategies employed and continued through Leslie Hewitt’s photography wherein her conceptual approach allows her to operate within the paradigm of sculpture for thinking through the relationship between black history and personal memories, as well as in Wu Tsang’s narrative techniques in her filmmaking, where fantastical detours give us unyielding access into the imaginary and dive into hidden and lesser-known histories.

Finally, the exhibition conveys a transgenerational conversation with the presence of the works of Etel Adnan and Bettina, both deceased in November 2021, and both having experienced indifference from the art world for their lifelong artistic practices. Adnan – although celebrated as a poet – only gained international recognition as a painter from 2012 with her participation in dOCUMENTA(13). Bettina, a prolific visual artist working with sculpture, photography, and film, worked in isolation in her room at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City for nearly fifty years. Her first institutional show was with Yto Barrada in 2019 in a two-women exhibition titled The Power of Two Suns at the LMCC Arts Center on Governors Island. The weather is uncertain tonight, as is my soul includes five sculptures by Bettina, parts of a much larger body of work that encapsulates her visual grammar: rigorous, self-referential, at once fragile and yet proud.

Etel Adnan’s work is represented with one of her Leporellos, an exercise of drawing with writing – illuminating the essential connection in Adnan’s work of visual form, poetry, and writing. A video by Lamia Joreige in collaboration with Etel Adnan bears witness to the precious transgenerational inspirations and exchanges which permeate the show.

Educational institutions are also spaces for transgenerational dialogue and collaboration as much as it is a space for producing and sharing knowledge. Each work in this exhibition explores forms and practices of knowledge production and dissemination that resist, supplement, thwart, and undercut dominant ones. They all embrace multiplicity, and polyphony as ways to repair invisibilized pasts, imagine more liveable futures and commit to solidarity in the present.