Regarding Fear and Hope examined two abiding emotions dominating the contemporary political and cultural landscape: fear and hope. Exploring the ways in which artists form connections with this milieu, the exhibition included works by both Australian and international artists that consider diverse identities, immigration, conflict, surveillance, and the challenging economic and political environments of the time.

In particular, Regarding Fear and Hope tackled the emotional tenor of the day. It aimed to investigate and register the political and cultural dimensions of these emotional states. The show recognised the increasing and pervading sense of ‘fear’ made manifest in some of the more extreme attitudes to immigrants and asylum seekers, but also in responses to the abstract notions of change, risk and difference. As the exhibition description observed: ‘It is perhaps not so much that we are actually fearful, but that fear itself is more present today, as a concept, a justification, an irritant and a political concern.’

A counterpoint to fear is hope—and one of the urgent questions of our time is whether we can have hope or not. Hope is an emotion that many of us have experienced at one time or another. But a sense of hope in the wake of fear is altogether different. Hope requires faith in human behaviour. As curator Victoria Lynn suggested:

This is not an exhibition about ‘emotions’ in the personal sense of its meaning. Regarding Fear and Hope tackles the states of fear and receding horizons of hope. Art has the capacity to convey such states, or at least to respond to them with both aesthetic and ethical means.

The exhibition was accompanied by a full colour illustrated catalogue featuring essays by Victoria Lynn and by Ghassan Hage, author and Chair of Anthropology at the University of Sydney.

^{Image: Yael Bartana, Odds and Ends 2005 (still). Courtesy Annet Gelink Gallery Amsterdam}