A Space for Critical
Design Thinking
Exhibitions
HOW MATTER COMES TO MATTER
Date:
13 Jun – 30 Aug 2026
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We write this in a time of war – a time when grief, trauma, and fear move through us collectively, when the fragility of life is not a philosophical abstraction but a daily, bodily reality. It is in this weight that the question of how we survive together becomes most urgent, and most tender.

How matter comes to matter explores precarity as a shared condition of life and a generative ground for collaborative survival — among human and nonhuman beings, living and non-living creatures. It approaches survival not as an individual achievement but as a collective practice shaped by vulnerability, interdependence, and uncertainty.

The exhibition brings together artistic practices that articulate survival through material kinship: relationships constituted through shared processes, dependencies, and what philosopher Karen Barad calls "intra-actions." Here, knowing becomes a form of becoming kin: to know something is to be entangled with it. Matter carries ancestral traces, memory, continuity, and transformation. Objects are not inert. They mediate, participate, and speak.

To move through this exhibition is to practice love in the sense bell hooks gave the word: not a feeling passively received, but a verb, a willed commitment to the flourishing of life. A love that extends toward the unfamiliar, the other, the nonhuman, the material world. A love that makes kinship where kinship was not thought possible, and opens toward a different understanding of history, of one another, and of the futures we might still hold in common.

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