Don’t You Know Who I Am? – Art After Identity Politics is a major group exhibition at M HKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, reflecting how emergent artists relate to issues of ‘identity politics’ today.

Curators: Anders Kreuger and Nav Haq, M HKA

With: Anthea Hamilton, Augustas Serapinas, Donna Kukama, Eloise Hawser, Ermias Kifleyesus, Guan Xiao, Haegue Yang, Hedwig Houben, Iman Issa, Imran Qureshi, Juha Laakkonen, Katja Novitskova, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Liesbeth Doms, Maria Safronova, Maria Taniguchi, Massimo Grimaldi, Nadezhda Grishina, Nástio Mosquito, Oleg Ustinov, Onkar Kular & Noam Toran, Oscar Murillo, Patrizio Di Massimo, Pedro Barateiro, Pennacchio Argentato, Shilpa Gupta, Wu Tsang

Don’t You Know Who I Am’ is a phrase we might expect to hear from celebrities being refused entry to a nightclub, or politicians trying to dissuade a policeman from giving them a parking ticket and expecting to get away with it because of who they are. In this case it also refers to the fact that many of the artists in the exhibition will be less well-known to a wider audience. This exhibition, on both main floors of the M HKA and in several off-site locations, is intended as a large-scale survey of the modes and means for considering identity and identification.

New generations of artists interrogate the formation of identities in the world through strategies such as performativity, abstraction, thingness, the logic and aesthetics of the digital, activism, analysis of selfhood from cultural and scientific perspectives or addressing the role of the viewer. These strategies may not always reinforce each other, but artists have not accepted any ban on self-contradiction. The exhibition will invite and even provoke different perspectives from the artists invited, as well as the audience and other participants in the project, such as writers for the publication or speakers for discursive events.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of discursive activities, including a symposium at Cinema Zuid in Antwerp on 14 June. A one-day programme of performances and talks with some of the artists participating in the exhibition and other invited speakers. The symposium will explore important shifts that seem to be taking place in culture today, as led by artists and observed by intellectuals. The contributions will consider notions from ‘universality’ and ‘populism’, to ‘selfhood’, ‘normality’ and ‘difference’, all in relation to the ‘I-word’ of the exhibition subtitle.

Don’t You Know Who I Am? – Art After Identity Politics is organised in partnership with AIR Antwerp, which offers residencies in Antwerp to participating artists.

The exhibition will also include a substantial e-book published in English, Dutch and French versions. They can be downloaded for free from the project’s microsite afteridentity.muhka.be, to be launched in June.

Don’t You Know Who I Am? – Art after Identity Politics is organised by M HKA within the framework of “The Uses of Art”, a project by the European museum network L’Internationale.

www.muhka.be