“Sometimes laughter hurts, but humour and mockery are our only weapons”. -Cabu (pen name of Jean Cabut), cartoonist and co-founder of Charlie Hebdo (13 Jan 1938-2015)
The complexity of the contemporary world we live in, significantly more so after a long period of disorientation, calls for varied means and devices to navigate it. The intention of this curatorial plan was to penetrate the malaise that blanketed everything, by seeking out artists whose work employed a lens of humour and satire to contextualise life/reality. License to Laugh brings together artworks that engender altered perceptions, and awaken nuances of playfulness and new meaning. Art has the power to heal, to envision lightness and transformation in the midst of grim truth; more than anything it can create escapes into multidimensional spaces of the artists imagination.
The artists' styles reference popular culture and outsider art, including visual vocabularies of comics, cartoons, animation, graffiti and posters, as well as legacies of domestic aesthetics, bazaar art and games. The exhibition explores the scope of these graphic languages and compositional frameworks that lend themselves to the expression of multi-layered narratives. The 7 artists utilize differing points of departure in addressing the theme, covering aspects of the personal and the political, and subverting conventional archetypes to open-up plural interpretations. From satirical views of adulthood and growing up, to the employment of game-play as a means of understanding contemporary (individual and social) crises; from witty commentaries on gender roles and the re-visioning of woman-hood, to unravelling memories and wild fantasies through acts of 'making', the artworks subtly as well as visibly build on the broad premise of humour.
Humour and irony exist is a spectrum of shades - from light to dark and in between, associated with varying degrees of human conditioning and acceptance. What may appeal to some audiences, may leave others untouched, even angered; and in our current social ecosystem, acts of personal and artistic liberty have increasingly come under threat of censorship.
License to Laugh is about questioning our present times, of giving ourselves the chance to be light-hearted and irreverent without fear- it is about reviewing our collective contemporary and embracing humour in all its forms, as a weapon, even in the darkest of times.