Unfair Weather at Lychee One
11 November – 17 December 2021
Curated by Lian Zhang with Anna Souter
Featuring Chechu Álava, Bea Bonafini, Mary Herbert, Gabrielle Kruger, Alicia Reyes McNamara, James Owens, Marlene Steyn, Lian Zhang
Lychee One proudly presents Unfair Weather, a group exhibition curated by Lian Zhang with Anna Souter. Unfair Weather takes friendship as a structuring principle, examining the importance of personal connections in the face of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Threads of common interest emerge through ties of affection and like-mindedness; there is a radical potential in taking friendship seriously, as a way of looking beyond traditional societal structures and responsibilities and seeking for social change based on open-heartedness, shared affection, and intimacy.
Over the last 18 months, the value of friendship has been undermined by governments’ focus on households, promoting traditional family units and disproportionately impacting interpersonal relationships that are not recognised in law. Unfair Weather upends the concept of a “fair weather friend”, instead emphasising the capacity of communities to flourish in challenging times, whether withstanding the storms of the pandemic or responding to social issues. The title also hints at the pressing environmental crisis of which the pandemic is arguably a symptom. We are already seeing how climate breakdown leads to more extreme weather events, unjustly impacting marginalised peoples and those least equipped to deal with them.
In different ways, the works in this exhibition are all rooted in attempts to come to terms with the exceptional circumstances in which we are all living. At a time when gestures of affection through touch and physical presence have been disallowed, these artists have used alternative visual love languages to share embodied senses and to convey personal hopes and concerns. With an emphasis on figurative painting, the works in this exhibition evoke both the limitations and the freedoms engendered by the pandemic, from the stay-at-home orders to the opportunities to forge connections with the more-than-human world.