A group exhibition for the first-year Art Practice MFA cohort, titled Revolt Against the Sun, opened in the Worth Ryder Art Gallery on January 29, 2025. In addition to featuring the work of six artists (Eleni Berg, GG, Héctor Muñoz-Guzmán, Kristiana Chan 莊礼恩, Swaleha, Zuhoor Al Sayegh), it features catalog essays written by History of Art graduate student Kimberly Yu. Acting as an interlocutor as well as an interpreter for the exhibition, Kim undertook studio visits and attended meetings with the exhibiting artists. On March 6, she will moderate a panel discussion at a closing reception. This collaboration between Art Practice and History of Art is a recurring one, each year offering our graduate students a chance to engage and contextualize emerging practices.
For more information about the exhibition and opening hours, see https://art.berkeley.edu/event-calendar/2025/1/21/revolt-against-the-sun
As Kim writes in her framing text: Titled after a poem by Nazik al-Mala'ika, which mourns lost faith in existing systems, Revolt Against the Sun takes up a seemingly impossible call to arms. The poem's expressed disillusionment with the promises of a beautiful life under a once exalted sun parallels the ways many of us now soberly face the failures of the contemporary structures we live under. The artists in this exhibition contend with what resists the sun's oppressive rays—histories and relationships that intimately connect us to each other and our nonhuman kin across time and space. Revolt Against the Sun asks us to envision what life can be in the face of what is.