Who Thinks the Future?

About

Curated by Tom Trevatt & Peer Sessions Recently, there has been a resurgence in thinking the future. Not only what horrors it may hold, but how we might construct it. This important task had fallen out of favour over the last thirty years, a period of time that could be equated with a general repetition of the logic of the same. If we are now forced to think forward again, to find ways out of impending climate crises for example, we have to find new methodologies by which to construct our shared future. Perhaps the logics of contemporary art, a non-oriented, cyclical exercise, are inadequate for dealing with this project. However, equally, the modernist conditions under which the avant-garde appeared no longer exist. Thus new models need to be constructed. This exhibition asks whether the artist is a figure with whom these tasks can be carried out. Without assuming the privilege usually associated with this exceptional figure, we ask what role the artist has now, and what they should have in the future. To engage in these questions we will adopt a methodology of synthetic thinking, practised as it is by Peer Sessions, to combine multiple ideas into complex wholes. This practice, something that art is capable of, could be utilised to connect and represent positions across a spectrum, enabling an ecology of ideas to be enacted or engendered. The exhibition will negotiate these concerns, attenuating them through art practice, and start thinking the future.