How Rest the Brave at NEST

Artists: Helen Cammock, Danilo Correale, Katarina Juričić, Yoojin Lee, Ana Montiel, Frida Orupabo, Remco Osório Lobato, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Mladen Stilinović

Exhibition title: How Rest the Brave

Venue: NEST, The Hague, The Netherlands

Date: January 14  – March 13, 2022

Photography: Charlott Markus / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and NEST, Rotterdam

Note: Exhibition booklet is available here

In a society that focuses on optimizing and commercializing all our waking moments, questions about the ability to resist the growing demands of capital arise. The group exhibition How Rest the Brave throws a spanner in the wheels of the debilitating productivity culture and questions its excesses.

What aspects of our daily lives provide radical options for escaping the shadow of optimized productivity? What does it mean to do nothing? can weHowdeal with the need for rest? What value does the unproductive body have?

The lazy protest. The peaceful refusal. The works in this exhibition muse on the potential of dreaming and sleeping as a personal agency within politicized and organized, linear time. They navigate the political dynamics that define which body can afford to rest and which cannot. They research how through both historical and cultural conditioning, each resting body is read and interpreted differently.

The nine artists in How Rest the Brave explore how rest is used as a form of resistance against the growing profit society, which is becoming less equal by the minute. The astonishing, unimaginable reality is that nothing of capitalist value can be withdrawn from rest, dreaming, sleeping, and napping. This exhibition invites you to dream away and reflect on valuesthe and limits of so-called ‘lost time’.

Katarina Juricic, Dreamobile, 2021-22