At this crucial time in history, as perhaps all times are, the climate of uncertainty grows hotter and hotter. Distrust in governments has led to increased partisanship and in some cases, civil unrest and even revolution. In the USA we are seeing artists increasingly turn to political themes. Sometimes these manifest themselves in oblique ways and at other times are directly engaged but all of the artists in this exhibition propose new ways of considering the Political and their relationship to these issues – of civil liberties and rights, of opposition to authority, of concerns over the future and to notions of freedom.

These artists can be seen as aligned with popular movements such as Occupy, Anonymous and Wikileaks, providing an alternative discourse for society while recognizing self-reflexively that they are marginalized somewhat – as the status and positioning of artists, within privileged spaces and audiences, can be problematic in relation to activism but still heralds the hope that these artists hold in the act of making art and its possibility for change.

The problematic aspects of the relationship of freedom to monetary power are also explored via a meta-dialogue exposed by the pragmatic limitations to the ability of the artists involved to transport their works to another audience. These financial boundaries themselves speak to the dynamic between the ability to have ones voice heard and the constrictions to expression, the right to assembly and association, caused by money and thus Power.

Artists: Gül Çağın, Sam Durant, Tracey Emin, Roni Feldman, Shaun Gladwell, Nicolas Grenier, Kio Griffith, William Kaminski, Jay Lizo, Marcos Lutyens, Claudia Parducci, Chad Person, Max Presneill