Yet we insist that life is full of happy chance is a proposal to reflect on persistence — as an archive of survival, a practice of mutual aid and an ethical imperative; ultimately, as an obstinate commitment to repair and to mend what has been broken. The exhibition looks at love as a sprawling landscape of vulnerability, error, and deliberate impurity, framing it as the labor of "un-despair" and exploring ways to conjure agency — however tenuous — in the face of polymorphous adversity.

The title is borrowed from Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, where this insistence is a claim against closure: an affirmation that contingency is a condition to be lived with, and sometimes through. “Happy chance” names method — a disciplined openness to what interrupts mastery, what cannot be owned by explanation or resolved into a lesson. The works gathered here trace love in that same register — as it persists through collective testimony, material witness, ritualized defiance, and the minor gestures of daily survival — as short bursts of triumph, as the unresolved, ongoing labor of enduring differently. To quote philosopher Gillian Rose, “to live, to love, is to be failed; to forgive, to have failed, to be forgiven, for ever and ever.”

The artists in the exhibition share with us the works that emerge from their stories of solidarity, historical narratives or phantasmagorical poetics. The Archivo de la Memoria Trans documents a network of support carefully built over decades by the trans community in Argentina, one driven by joy and affirming the fullness of life against state neglect. In Aysha E Arar’s drawings the persistent thread of color merges thehuman and theinhuman, the familiar and theinfraperceptual into a weave of images, a freely flowing cotton architectural frieze, echoing the frescoes on the monastery’s walls. The video installation by Gabrielle Goliath focuses on the experiences of a former Nigerian news anchor, including displacement due to homophobic legislation and the lasting precarity in the ensuing years. The rubber keeps the traces of the female body’sexperience under colonial rule in Southeast Asia in Rossella Biscotti’s Maiko, while ghostly leather female bodies, discarded and wasted, hide — almost invisible — between the columns of the cloister. Pauline Curnier Jardin developed her pieces together with sex workers from the Feel Good Cooperative in Rome — in an effort to provide financial assistance during the pandemic. All these seeds of support, protection and love might help the sprouts emerge from the mud and clay of the cloister’s flowerbed, which has been deconstructed and recreated in the exhibition architecture conceived by Mariano Cuofano.