5/ {i laugh at your promise of happiness}

Blanca Bercial, Ira Konyukhova, Zhang Mengjiao, WE DA PEPO collective

School of Visual Arts, 10th Floor, 132 W 21st St, New York, NY 10011

In the last four years, we have witnessed a drastic increase in harsher border-control policies all across the world: from the “zero tolerance” enforcement implemented by the Trump administration in 2018 to the strict protocols and travel restrictions enacted worldwide in the wake of the ongoing pandemic. The question of borders, particularly bureaucratic managerial processes associated with it in various countries of Europe and North America, pertains to a relevant concern to this day. The same regimes create a paradoxical effect - a bubble of empty promises - by fostering the ethos based on the idea of reaching a better place. {i laugh at your promise of happiness} gathers forms of artistic expression that incorporate humor as a means to confront the larger issue of borders, displacement, and immigration. Humor has often served as a source of refuge; for centuries, the power to evoke laughter sustained our humanity in the painful moments of crisis and hardships. In this selection of works, each artist deliberately deploys humor as a mechanism of reckoning and coping with their own experiences of displacement. Humor for them also operates as a critique of the forms of unjust and deceptive “guarantees,” making it a tool for maneuvering through the endless confinements of bureaucracy. They reject and question the attitudes expected of immigrants to merely be grateful and stay quiet within such systems. {i laugh at your promise of happiness} openly reveals artists’ disagreement and skepticism toward unmet [empty] promises of happiness. The exhibition aims to start a broader conversation around the issues of injustice embedded in border-control policies.

March 2021