The

Ruse

of

Possibility:

‘A

Different

Now

is

Close

Enough

to

Exhale

on

You’

Drawing its title from Eloghosa Osunde’s text ‘& Other Stories’, A Different Now is Close Enough to Exhale on You, curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, explores the generative yet fraught terrain of redefinition, transformation, and “otherwise-world-making.” Through artworks and texts, the exhibition suggests that art possesses the capacity to rupture inherited meanings and imagine alternative futures.

What is always left unattended by the proponents of these otherwise-world projects, like Ndikung and Osunde (and the general fields of contemporary art, Cultural studies, Black studies, performance, to name a few) is (1) the ontological ground upon which subjects are instituted, (2) the subject’s formation and entry into the Symbolic, which, loosely, constitutes entry into Law and language that precedes and exceeds the subject, and (3) an explanation of these new otherworlds’ relation to this World, this present unethical, parasitic and predatory onto-epistemological order in which we find and intuit ourselves in space and time.

At the centre of this critique lies the question of Black suffering and its representation in art. The exhibition’s reluctance to name the specific antagonisms—Blackness, racial slavery, the longue durée of structural violence—is seen as a form of mystification, where symbolic gestures of transformation risk substituting for real structural change. Despite this, the show remains a potent site for thinking through the tensions between artistic imagination and political possibility, calling viewers to confront the limits of what art can do—and what it too easily assumes it already has.