Imaginary Territories

Abstract

Imaginary Territories explores the concept of a ‘territory’ as a domain of the inner world – a representation that expresses an ‘internal truth’. Through this Surrealist lens, the artists’ territories are simultaneously real and imagined, explored into being; a place where both conscious and subconscious realities are envisioned. It has become especially important in an era of environmental/world crisis and political divisiveness to conceive new realities, new territories. Surrealism has historically outlined a path back to mythic structures to produce new visions, via its innate inward-looking viewpoint that often unites nature/animal/myth with a political/defiant vision. Imaginary Territories allows artists to imagine topographies that overcome earthbound borders, barriers and displacements. The exhibition embarks on an odyssey that is global in outlook, acknowledging the centenary of the emergence of Surrealist modes of artistic inquiry from Paris in the early 1920s, which spread worldwide, right to the ends of the earth, into the far-away Antipodes.