Adam Rouhana’s second London solo exhibition constructs a prism that rejects constituent ontological violence and instead works toward the formation of emancipatory potentialities.
Before Freedom Pt. 2: The Revolution Cannot Be Built on Dreams Alone will feature new work made in 2024, drawing inspiration from the fertility of the land and the verdancy of spring in Palestine. Questioning history, memory, space, politics and reality itself, Rouhana leverages photography to challenge the temporalities of a supremacist regime of visuality. Assembling geopolitical, socio-cultural and historical awareness into aesthetic formations, this exhibition argues for expanding notions of subjectivity—self-consciously scrutinizing dominant transhistorical representations and presenting an alternative. Whether you are seeing children playing football, friends and family swimming together, streetlife or images of natural life, this work is a description of the abundance of life in Palestine today. The work is—inspired by Amilcar Cabral—a vigorous manifestation on the ideological plane of the physical, historical and material realities of Palestinian society, rejecting domination and instead cultivating the fruit of collective history to usurp the free operation of the process of productive cultural development—where it is possible to dream of tomorrow.
Curated by Lobna Sana, this new body of work is an extension of Adam’s ongoing work Before Freedom (2022- ongoing) has been gaining attention internationally both through social media and press coverage including in The New York Times, Aperture, Dazed, and GQ.
