Take Back Your Keys
Exhibition Curation
Regionale23 Visarte Region Basel. 2023
Basel, Switzerland
A curatorial project for Visarte Region Basel's participation in the Regionale23.
​This group exhibition examines how dominant values, belief systems, and ideals—often presented as essential to societal order—can become restrictive cultural norms. When used as tools of exclusion, control, or protection, these ideals can limit individual expression and collective growth.
​
Take Back Your Keys artistically explores the tension between personal inspiration and societal expectation. It reflects on the importance of self-trust and agency in pursuing ideas that may challenge established structures but offer transformative potential.
​
The participating artists investigate how imposed ideals and standardised metrics shape hierarchies across different spaces, inviting viewers to reconsider who holds power—and how it can be reclaimed.
Curatorial Note
What does it mean to "take back your key"? How does the idea of access, or lack thereof, affect our sense of individual freedom?
Taking back the key is about reclaiming our own identity, detached from the forms and expectations into which we are socially indoctrinated. The function of a key is to either close or open different access points. It then becomes a symbol that illustrates an outcome of the arduous process in which we attempt to fulfil social norms.
This project recognizes that it is often through the pursuit of transnational ideas that societies begin to ask relevant questions that have the capacity to innovate and contribute to our human development.
This concept is an extension of Regionale, a tri-regional cross-border exhibition that addresses the notion of borders (which are also often used to convey hierarchical values) and provides an opportunity to unite, share and celebrate different perspectives precisely because they come from different regions.
This allows us to draw parallels and helps us understand that constructs that constrain people do not only exist at borders, but are also embedded in society in various other ways.
Exhibiting Artists: Sylvain Baumann, Kwaku Opoku,Kerstin Wittenberg, Marisabel Arias, Claudia Gutiérrez Marfull, Tiago Francez, Ester Alemayehu Hatle.
