A Storm Is Blowing From Paradise
From September 17 through November 27, 2022, Oscar Murillo will stage a large-scale exhibition in the historic setting of the Scuola Grande della Misericordia, Venice. Titled A Storm Is Blowing From Paradise, the exhibition will include new paintings by Murillo, alongside an extensive, interactive presentation of Frequencies, the artist’s long-term, collaborative project with school students.
Initiated in 2013, Frequencies has seen blank artist canvases fixed to classroom desks in over 350 schools worldwide. Students aged 10–16 are invited to freely draw on, write on, and mark the canvases over a period of 6 months, alongside their daily activities. The resulting canvases, with their accumulation of both conscious and unconscious markings, form a monumental collection of over 40,000 individual examples bearing the marks of hundreds of thousands of individual students.
Oscar Murillo has collaborated with SAVVY Contemporary on the public program ‘Dispersing towards being & becoming together: frequential reconfigurations’ to accompany this exhibition.
The program unfolds through four investigations; DISPERSAL, which reflects on the experience of the diaspora; CONVERGENCE, referring to the getting together and sharing of a struggle across differences and geographies; FRAGMENTATION, the recognition of difference in the common struggle; and RECONFIGURATION, evoking new senses of belonging.
The program features Phyllis Akinyi, Ekow Alabi & the drummers of joy, Archive Books (Leila Bencharnia, Wissal Houbabi, Omar Delnevo), Frank Báez, Blick Bassy, Maria Buenaventura, Clara Dublanc, Tanka Fonta, folkloric mashup from Mar, Rio, Cordillera, Oscar Murillo, Kettly Nöel, Saca Sal, Michelle M. Wright, and many more.
The preview will be September 16, 2022, from 6-8 PM. Learn more about the exhibition at A Storm Is Blowing From Paradise.
Cover image: Oscar Murillo, disrupted frequencies (Colombia, Brazil, Turkey, China), 2013–2019 (detail). Photo by Tony Prikryl
Panelist Event
TIME named Wolfgang Tillmans to the 2023 TIME100, its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Tony-nominated playwright Jeremy O. Harris was invited to write about the artist, stating “[...] Tillmans has the unique ability to take his viewer through histories and timelines both real and imagined, as seen in his recent traveling retrospective, To Look Without Fear.
Read a new poem from the artist, on the occasion of her solo exhibition in New York, I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers.