Sculpture (Sculpture)

Drought Mask by Rajni Perera is a prototype that is suggestive of dire implications for human survival. Directly addressing the urgent climate crisis, specifically wide-spread drought, this sculpture imagines hybrid cultural aesthetics of the near-future after global collapse. Composed of various woven textiles complete with frills and fringes, leather, a gas mask, and pencil, Rajni’s mask prefigures future dystopian characters who are resilient and resourceful; self-fashioning tools for survival.

Painting (Painting)

Miercoles cerca de las 7 de la tarde by Caroline Fusilier portrays two quantum computers that are mobile, with human-esque legs, these are systems at the edge of biology. The floor is awash with fluid; perhaps a chemical resource consumed by the advanced computers or a heat-sink. Where their legs meet the fluid there’s a soft glow, less intense but related to the vibrant radiation on the wall above the figures.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

This work was conceived by Zhilyaev as part of the M. I. R.: Polite Guests from the Future exhibition. This iteration of the imagined Museum of Russian History (M. I. R.) is seen from a distant future standpoint. The Russian word ‘mir’ means both peace as well as ‘the world’, and is also the name of the first space station to ever orbit earth.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Developed especially for the KADIST-KHOJ collaborative exhibition, Frozen World of the Familiar Stranger , Radar Level is set in the world’s last geological minutes, in two ancient landscapes. One in the northern hemisphere in Mongolia at the site of the first dinosaur egg excavation and the other beneath the southern constellation of Nambia, on its old waters. Embedded within the work are a series of dualities and codes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the film La Edad de Oro (The Golden Age) Javier Castro asks several children to describe what they want to be when they grow up and what their best career option is in Cuba. Their responses are telling: some hopeful or playful in nature as one would expect, and others crudely revealing the harsh reality that the children perceive. The work takes its title from a children’s magazine produced by José Martí in 1889, during the years leading to the Cuban War of Independence from Spain in which Marti lost his life.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Erratum: Brief Interruptions in the Waste Stream exists as performance, sculpture, drawing, video and the printed word. In a short video the two artists Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine transform a porcelain toilet into bricks in four movements. In quite brutal actions, they use sledgehammers to smash the toilet into small shards that are then reshaped to form a stack of bricks.

Installation (Installation)

Future Gestalt re-imagines a large-scale sculpture “ Smoke” by Tony Smith as embodying a futuristic intelligence that communicates with a group of communitarians undergoing experimental psychotherapy. Future Gestalt is not a video of a performance, rather, it is a documentation of the last of four unscripted sessions of guided participation led by the artist. Through the title and form, the sessions suggest Gestalt therapy, promoted as a form of personal transformation in California at the Esalen Institute.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

After Scarcity is a sci-fi video-essay that tracks Soviet cyberneticians (1950s – 1980s) in their attempt to build a fully-automated planned economy. If history at its best is a blueprint for science-fiction, revisiting contingent histories of economic technology might enable an access to the future. Vindicating this other internet , the work presents the economic application of socialist cybernetic experiments as extraordinary to financial arrangements and imaginations of our time.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Future Tense (2017), a 16-page diary, is a project in the form of a newspaper that brings together 50 oracles by people from various political opinions and ethnicities who consulted sand, lead, tarot cards, coffee grounds, blank sheets of A4 paper, dreams, water, clairvoyance, astrology, pendulums and horoscopes in order to reveal the point that Turkey has reached in news casting. The 2016 coup d’etat led to the closure of many news sources and the incarceration of writers and journalists. Following the growing censorship and shift away from the rule of law, the number of fortunetellers and astrologers is steadily increasing.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In Ningwasum , Subash Thebe Limbu explores Adivasi Futurism, a concept he has developed over a number of years, inspired by the writings of Octavia Butler, Afrofuturism, Indigenous Futurism, and various Adivasi, Janajati, feminist, queer, and Dalit movements. The video features an Indigenous, astronaut time traveller from the future, whose Indigenous nation not only co-exists with other nations and allies but also contains advanced technology that would appear magical to those from the present. Filmed mostly in the Himalayas, including the Wasanglung region in Eastern Nepal believed to be the shamanic home of the Yakthung, Ningwasum weaves oral narratives, animations, language, storytelling, soundscapes, and electronic music.

Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)

The VR play Meat Growers: A Love Story by Rindon Johnson centers on two meat growers who work together in a meat processing factory in the year 2100. The setting is a post-Green New Deal Napa Valley where there are no more paved roads, trees abound, and all the strip malls have been turned into food forests and meat growing plants. The protagonists seem to move through their day automatically, yearning for each other, as the viewer acts as a friend and confidant, silently bearing witness to their desire.

Photography (Photography)

Wordplay was a central focus of Koller’s work, in particular the acronym U. F. O, which he adapted in his diagrammatic drawings to stand variously for Univerzálna Futurologická Organizácia (Universal Futurological Organization, 1972–3), Univerzálny Filozoficky Ornament (Universal Philosophical Ornament, 1978) or Underground Fantastic Organization (1975), and which also appeared in a series of slapsticky self-portraits titled ‘U. F. O.–naut’ (1970–2007). These infinite variations on a common cipher constituted an insistent incantation of the Utopian principle.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In Ningwasum , Subash Thebe Limbu explores Adivasi Futurism, a concept he has developed over a number of years, inspired by the writings of Octavia Butler, Afrofuturism, Indigenous Futurism, and various Adivasi, Janajati, feminist, queer, and Dalit movements. The video features an Indigenous, astronaut time traveller from the future, whose Indigenous nation not only co-exists with other nations and allies but also contains advanced technology that would appear magical to those from the present. Filmed mostly in the Himalayas, including the Wasanglung region in Eastern Nepal believed to be the shamanic home of the Yakthung, Ningwasum weaves oral narratives, animations, language, storytelling, soundscapes, and electronic music.

Photography (Photography)

The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale. These photographs present a series of urban landscapes and assembled Foucauldian structures of the present. Du sees the Tower of Babel as a continually reinvented narrative that warns people of “dangerous tendencies in the present time.” Du’s Babylonian towers resurrect from fallen rubbles of religious history in grand scale to focus on modern crises of civilization.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Produced on the occasion of an exhibition at ARTIUM of Alava, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, this deck of cards is a selection of images from Carlos Amorales’s Liquid Archive. and abstract silhouetted motifs, in a black and white palette, are combined to create a world lodged between fantasy and reality typical of the tarot game. Airplanes, letters, naked women, Osama Bin Laden, Che Guevara, mythological figures, skulls, wrestlers’ masks are some of the visuals that populate this printed object.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Based on historical prophecies and fantasy, the artist creates apocalyptic scenarios that posit an enigmatic world plagued by social, political, and environmental upheaval. Untitled (Set of Six Drawings) (2012) is an intricate watercolor of a child sitting cross-legged with its head stuck inside a giant mask resembling a duck head covered with eyes. It looks like a scene snatched from science fiction or a surreal dream; it is tempting to see in it some kind of warning sign, or an ominous vision of the future.

The two drawings in the Kadist Collection are part of a larger series entitled Las Mariposas Eternas (The Eternal Butterflies). They are studies for two large sculptures that explore the role of monuments and emblems in the configuration of Latin American national identities. The first drawing reproduces an equestrian statue of Juan Lavalle, one of Argentina’s independence heroes.

Photography (Photography)

The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale. These photographs present a series of urban landscapes and assembled Foucauldian structures of the present. Du sees the Tower of Babel as a continually reinvented narrative that warns people of “dangerous tendencies in the present time.” Du’s Babylonian towers resurrect from fallen rubbles of religious history in grand scale to focus on modern crises of civilization.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Meeting #100 is one in a series of text works by Jonathan Monk. In this series, the artist attempts to organize meetings somewhere in the world. The audience is given the details of a meeting—the place, date and time—and nothing more.