Buro Stedelijk presents Manifestation #53: I Must Still Grow in the Dark, which will open on Thursday 22 May between 19:30 and 21:30, during Amsterdam Art Week 2025.
I must still grow in the dark is an eclipsing group exhibition curated by Stéphanie Noach and Rita Ouédraogo in which darkness operates as a vital matter that is capable of making things happen and producing effects. Some more evocative, such as the dilution of the boundaries between body and space or the protection of knowledge from outsiders, others blatantly agitative, such as the disruption of the dominant light-loving and darkness-abhorring imaginary. The impact of this reappraisal of darkness cannot be underestimated.
By accentuating that it possesses a series of properties that modern systems tend to ignore, the exhibition challenges the racist and colonial associations between this category and evil, ignorance, and cruelty. And it does more: it contradicts a binary system that has turned darkness into the opposite of light, in the same way, that it has opposed black to white, culture to nature, mind to body, and reason to sensibility.
With works by a.o. Belkis Ayón, Ana Maria Gomez, Antonio Vega Macotela, Jessica Sofia Mitrani, Paolo Nazareth, Andrés Pereira Paz and René Peña
Spatial design by Frederique Albert-Bordenave
Curated by Rita Ouédraogo and Stéphanie Noach
Image credit: Andrés Pereira Paz, ‘EGO FVLCIO COLLVMNAS EIVS’ [I FORTIFY YOUR COLUMNS], 2020, mixed media, installation view, 11th Berlin Biennale, Gropius Bau, 2020. Courtesy of Andrés Pereira Paz; Photography: Trevor Lloyd
