Exhibition - “Me, Myself, I Dance Too. Summer-Dream-Prélude to Hannah Arendt” at Kestner Gesellschaft

Installation view at Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover, 2024. Credit: Kestner Gesellschaft

El Hadji Sy is part of the collective exhibition “Me, Myself, I Dance Too. Summer-Dream-Prélude to Hannah Arendt” curated by Adam Budak at Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover, opening on August 10 and on view until October 13, 2024.

Me, Myself, I Dance Too. Summer-Dream-Prélude to Hannah Arendt” elaborates Arendt's concept of amor mundi (love of the world). In her 1958 treatise The Human Condition, she writes: “Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political forces.” Her amor mundi - love of the world - is a relational form of love, based upon understanding and critical thinking rather than sentiment or affect; a promise of continued existence, a way of not resigning from the world when the world seems too unbearable to live in. What is most difficult, Arendt continues, is to love the world as it is.

"Humbled words and invisible faces recall souls in the void and suspense, both solid and vulnerable, unstable and enclosing, liberating like El Hadji Sy’s kites, floating in the galaxy of a future universe, dancing in and out of painting in a frenzy of a gestural abstraction, chimes of freedom.”

- Adam Budak