M(a)us(ol)eum of Precious Pasts and Disposable Futures

An existential dilemma for artists, both as creative individuals and also as human beings living within a civilization perceived to be dying, is how to imagine agency against a backdrop of end-times inevitability and irreversibility. But, what if this relationship between vocation and destiny is misconflated after all? What if, behind it, lie interpretations glossed over as facts, causing cultural death, stagnation, and a sense of defeatedness that primes us for control?

The eight artists participating in this exhibition have, through their practices and ways of living, challenged and resisted the paralyzing fatalist imagination of collapse that has increasingly come to haunt our minds in recent years and flatten our experience of time and space. Their artworks uncover doctored histories and flaws in consensual reality, the pitfalls and limitations of the anthropocene and anthroposcale, and ways of understanding time and space outside progress-centric narratives.

What emerges across their practices is the possibility that the present trajectory remains revisable. Through facing the past anti-nostalgically, altering our understanding of destruction and decomposition, taking the cinematicity away from apocalypse, and remaining outside of specification, these artists suggest ways of imagining collective agency and, with it, the future.

To accept that things can end is also to accept that things can change. In refusing undeadness, a living culture shall remain capable of revision.

-Liza Markus