Mudam – The Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg. Architect: Ieoh Ming Pei. © Rémi Villaggi/Mudam Luxembourg.
After Laughter Comes Tears is the second edition of the Mudam Performance Season, an experimental exhibition dedicated to performance, launched in 2021. Conceived as a ‘performative exhibition’, After Laughter Comes Tears will feature the work of thirty-five artists working across the mediums of performance, installation and video. Titled after the 1964 track ‘After Laughter’ by American soul singer and songwriter Wendy Rene, the exhibition will unfold in four acts, mimicking a theatrical narrative. By considering moving image and installation as much as the exhibition and its scenography as performative objects, After Laughter Comes Tears proposes to expand the definition of performance. Simultaneously, it grounds the medium of performance within the museum, which traditionally hosts it as an occasional and timed utterance.
The exhibition takes as its starting point the feeling of stasis and anger that defines this later stage of capitalism endorsed by most societies. It is framed by the anxieties of a generation facing a climate crisis, welfare states trampled and failed by neoliberal policies and the rise of xenophobia and far-right parties across the globe, partly fuelled by fake news spreading on- and offline. Adopting the humorous, and at times, dramatic tone that is characteristic of theatricality and embracing the ambiguity that exists between those states, After Laughter Comes Tears unfolds through a narrative that speaks to and of bodies, politics and their fraught relationship under capitalist systems. The works of emerging artists, in dialogue with more established ones, will consider the crisis of care and deeply entrenched notions of normalcy, aiming to make visible and thereby question standardised approaches to social and biological norms.
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