FUTURE, NOW.

About

The exhibition Future, Now inhabits the liminal space where science fiction and contemporary art meet, giving us the possibility to think about the legacy of science fiction in contemporary Western culture.

Performer and conceptual artist Choy Ka Fay creates and engine that enables him to control the muscular movements of another person. His piece Prospectus for a Future Body (2010-2012) invites us to think about robots and futuristic technology, as well as the mind control exercised by the Jedi knights in Star Wars. Japanese painter Ryo Kato draws apocalyptic landscapes where incommensurable forces fight, displaying epic and monumental battles for life. On the contrary, Yulia Kazakova’s canvases are graphic dreams of industrial decadency, in which we can feel a sort of technological nostalgia between a post-modern nightmare and a distant hope. Chinese artist Li Hui combines the esthetic of the laser to create pieces which involve the viewer visually and emotionally, like Blooming (2012) while photographer Jelena Martinovic twists the obvious and invites us to look at the Earth as it wasn’t our own planet. Hojun Song plays with cyber technologies while Swiss artist Elisa Storelli want us to re-think our relationship to time with her Time Piece (All the Time of the World) (2014) and Time Piece (Beginning)(2014-2015).

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication written in collaboration with Australian author, radio producer and Star Wars fan Craig Schüftan.

Organizers:

Elisa Rusca is a Berlin-based art historian, writer and independent curator. She received her MA in History of Art and Archeology from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and for five years was assistant curator at the Collections of the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, where she co-curate a major national project, “Hans Steiner: Chroniques de la vie moderne” (www.elysee.ch). AICA Member since 2011, she actively collaborates with George, a Lausanne-based magazine about art, feminism and gender issues. In 2014, she curated Oblivion – Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Jacob Kirkegaard, Luke Munn, Virginie Rebetez, Sam Smith at Zweigstelle Gallery, Berlin and edited the catalogue, Oblio (Broken Dimanche Press, 2014). She is now collaborating with Nathalie Herschdorfer to the redaction of the New Dictionary of Photography (Thames&Hudson, 2015).

Craig Schüftan is a writer, radio producer and public speaker from Sydney, Australia, currently living and working in Berlin. He is the author of three books on music and popular culture, The Culture Club (2007), Hey! Nietzsche, Leave Them Kids Alone (2009) and Entertain Us! an Alternative history of Alternative rock in the 1990s (2012). Schuftan has given talks and lectures on music history, philosophy and art theory in Australia, the UK, the Netherlands and Germany, and presents a monthly event in Berlin called ‘Der Kultur Club’, a series of multimedia presentations on the relationship between modernism and popular music. He is currently writing and producing a long-form music documentary series for ABC Radio National, ‘Love in the 90s’, to be aired in early 2014.