In May (After October) takes its title from two revolutionary moments in Western history, the Russian October Revolution of 1917 and the French student protests of May 1968.

Importantly, it also makes reference to the social and political change that many hope will follow from the recent American Presidential election. This widespread call for ongoing change provides a platform for a consideration of the political currency of aesthetic practice. In particular, this exhibition focuses on photographic images, videos and films all working to articulate a productive refusal. From virtual abstraction to appropriated archival images and experiments with narrative structure, this international group of artists moves beyond creating easily consumed and didactic depictions. Together their works raise questions, asking how we can find new ways to say ‘no' and form suggestions for alternatives, both politically and aesthetically.

Related Essay: Kathrin Meyer, In May (After October)

"Thea Djordjadze's work is one of the few in the exhibition that does not employ appropriated material. Her Time Future Contained in Time Past II (2009) comprises a little plaster block alongside abstract drawings of amorphous shapes and geometrical structures. The object echoes something familiar but remains undetermined; the drawings, executed on lined notebook-paper, seem like sketches for something yet to be done, a reminder of some unsettled potentiality. Djordjadze's explorations of the anti-form are like shadows of something real, an imagination of the life of objects before they are named and defined. But her works are anything else but virtual, rather insisting on their thingness, presence and factitiousness. "What might have been is an abstraction / Remaining a perpetual possibility / Only in a world of speculation," continues T. S. Eliot's poem Burnt Norton whose first line provides the title for Djordjadze's work in the exhibition that mirrors the balance between presence and potential that characterizes her works."

Kathrin Meyer, In May (After October)