Mourning a revolution was an exhibition taking place in August 2025 in MaMA Rotterdam, curated by Salomé Lopes and Zé Lourenço. It alsooffered a public program of workshops and performances.
The exhibition gathers a group of emerging artists to reflect on the distant promises of past revolutions, in light of rising authoritarianism. The project emerged from a shared sense of urgency between two strangers - an artist and a political scientist, following the recent growth of the far-right in Portugal, their home country.
With this exhibition we hope to reflect on urgent questions in such pressing times. Should one mourn revolutionary promises? Or, would that be accepting defeat? Can one preserve the seeds of a revolution to use in the future? Or, do we need something new entirely? What is the appropriate response when grieving has become a permanent state — grieving the passivity, complicity and failure of institutions, governments or democracy itself?
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