I no longer curate very often. But, when I do, it has to really mean something. The anniversary exhibition The Only Way Out Is Through is partly autobiographical. Together with twenty years of The Third Line gallery in Dubai, it also celebrates two decades of my curatorial work in the Gulf (and beyond). It’s a timeline of timelines, featuring every artist represented by the gallery, with works pulled from storage set against historical ruptures across the region and the world. I’m borrowing from the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm when he said, in The Age of Extremes: A History of the World 1914–1991 (1994), that “my own lifetime coincides with most of the period with which this book deals.”1 My father passed away in December 2024, following an eighteen-month-long period of decline. This overlapped with the genocide in Gaza, which began in October 2023, a “hyper-event” that has violently shed many of the liberal masks we used to believe in. I had been thinking a lot about grief (and that term made famous in the TV show Succession, “pre-grieving”).
The title of the exhibition comes from that place of loss. It is now clear to me that there’s no way around grief: the only way out is through. I may have heard it first in Eartheater’s song “Airborne Ashes” (2020), and ever since, it has reappeared in multiple meme forms, as self-help or self-mockery. The even more internet vernacular version of that phrase, which I am also fond of, is “It is what it is.” And there’s a tertiary meaning, which is that to embark on anything long-term—such as sustaining an art gallery business over two decades, or being in love with the same person over that kind of duration—requires a supernatural force to overcome resistance, adversity, impossibility.
Read the full article on the Mousse Magazine website or the Mousse 94 print issue.