Pre-Future: Examining the Post-Contemporary
Curated by Valerie Amend
Artists: Morehshin Allahyari, Zach Blas, Cybertwee, Tabita Rezaire and Fannie Sosa
Web: www.fluidity.online
Exhibition dates: April 21–May 14, 2017 (exhibited online)
Launch party: Friday, April 21, 2017, 6-9 pm
Location: Pfizer Building, 630 Flushing Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11206
MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts is pleased to present Pre-Future, an online exhibition that serves as a guide to a speculative temporality in which the future has superseded the present. This time complex, which has been described as the “post-contemporary,” is a result of accelerated economies and preemptive conditions. If the post-contemporary is the erasure of the present, Pre-Future examines how to make the most of a hybridized temporality. Works by Morehshin Allahyari, Zach Blas, Cybertwee, Tabita Rezaire and Fannie Sosa examine current modes of artistic production, expose the biases of networked systems, create shared resources and propose thoughtful alternatives for our shared futures.
In their recent book, The Time Complex: Post-Contemporary (2016), Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik argue that the linearity of time has been disrupted—the future is replacing the present. But what appearance would post-contemporary art have, what would its characteristics be? The precarity of our current cultural climate allows us to imagine—even prescribe—how to look toward a future of post-contemporary art. In using the prefix “post-” to use a term that describes a relation the present, Avanessian and Malik look to the past, a moment we must come after. What if, instead of contemplating our present through the word “post-," we considered the present a pre-future, a foreshadowing of what is to come?
This exhibition is a study in potentiality. It presents resources—guides to anonymity, exposure of censorship, resistance to surveillance, ways to welcome people of color—that can be used to ameliorate our future condition. Pre-Future explores the possibility of alternatives. In the wake of the periodization of the contemporary, it is time to reconfigure new foundations for art.
Image: Morehshin Allahyari, from the series Dark Matter, 2014.