Here we go again, I thought, and the thought was at once provoking and dispiriting. To be sure, “again” does not necessarily signify “same old, same old,” especially now that the rules of the game have been altered, perhaps permanently, without meaningful say in the matter from most of its players. Just about all of us are being played.
I am talking politics, and I am talking art—the art of Marcelle Hanselaar in particular, or, to be more specific still, Hanselaar’s portfolio The Crying Game (2015/17).
“Here we go again” also because I previously curated an exhibition featuring selections from The Crying Game in 2023 in a show I mounted with students of my undergraduate curating module, at the School of Art, Aberystwyth University here in Wales.
Three-and-a-half years have passed since then. While that is a comparatively short period of time as far as the scheme of history, or even an average lifetime, is concerned, the shifts that have occurred geo-politically are seismic. We have never been here before, and we have never arrived here quite in this way.
A shift toward fascism throughout South America as well as in my native Germany; a shift—as odious and toxic as if the “f” had been purged from the word—marking a recrudescence, a descent into the new Dark Ages, that is fuelled largely by a surplus of testosterone.
His calculations were all wrong, Hanselaar titled her first print in the Crying Game series. It shows a naked man, a broken abacus in front of him, despairing as the world blows up not only in his face but in the faces of the woman and child facing him. The image is haunting. The words are Cassandric.
The works in The Same Boat, which I guest-curated for/at Gallery Gwyn, Aberaeron, are derived entirely from Marcelle Hanselaar’s print portfolio The Crying Game. Returning to that series now allows me to show not only how familiar these scenarios of conflict are to us still but how fundamentally the world has changed nevertheless since Hanselaar began to create the series.
In this, my 876th entry in the broadcastellan journal, I am annotating my introductory text panel for The Same Boat in hopes of articulating my rationale for the exhibition and for returning to The Crying Game at this particular point in time.