Rebel City

The geographer David Harvey argues that capitalism is more and more marked by the inequalities that result from uneven development. He observes that a disrupted social order has emerged globally, and that it is most apparent in metropolitan areas. He concludes that “the revolution in our times has to be urban, or nothing.” The metropolis, for him, is a contested terrain, a domain in which deep currents of anti-capitalist struggle are rising to the surface. “The rebel city,” he calls it.

This exhibition is inspired by Harvey’s concept. It examines the rebel city as a site of anti-capitalist frictions and insurrections. The featured works cite the “Battle of Seattle“, Occupy Wall Street, anarchism’s role as a key theoretical source for contestation, and the financialization of daily life. They engage with dissent symbolically, by evoking the intellectual roots, iconography, and material culture of protest.