Myths of the new future

Artists: Taysir Batniji, Dora Budor, Jesse Darling, Agnieszka Kurant, P. Staff

“Blessings are difficult to imagine. More palpable is our technofuture bleeding rapidly into the technopresent”. Emily Segal

Myths of the new future is an exhibition that brings together the work of five artists who, in varying and distinct ways, address psychosocial tensions in present-day urban life. Identifying a particularly anxious, unstable, and incoherent texture to our late-capitalist period, Myths of the new future circulates around the question of how it feels to be alive now, through experimental and conceptual works in sculpture, video, drawing, poetry and photography. The artists involved offer propositions that explore affective states, emotional intensities and the unsettling character of our urban social sphere today.

Drawing on the title of a 1982 short story by J. G. Ballard (1930–2009), the exhibition evokes many “Ballardian” tropes: hostile architectures, corporate control, maleficent technologies, civil collapse, a social body motivated by brutality and desire—making connections with the material conditions of the present.

With an awareness of the forces that shape our psychic experience, artists point towards a host of mental aggressors that fuel nervous states: ecological crises and war; volatile sociopolitical contexts and faltering neoliberal democracies; competing digital hegemonies and the bewildering immediacy of the “technopresent”. Artists make visible their feelings of estrangement within this continuum, and by doing so, call into question normative ways of living and being. Exposing the deepening cracks appearing across society, their work demonstrates the precariousness of the constructed urban world whilst opening up space for the emergence of other possible trajectories and innumerable futures.

Myths of the new future unfolds across familiar territories: privatised urban landscapes, mediated commercial environments, bureaucratic centres, and disembodied digital platforms. Artists work to subvert these frictionless spaces, deploying dark humour, asserting bodily sensation and cultivating a heightened sense of surrealism. By performing minor acts of vandalism or else picking through the man-made debris of the Anthropocene, artists find new, defiant ways of disrupting the rhythms of normal life and revelling in the generative potential of collapse. In this way, Myths of the new future may be understood as a speculative mythology for a fast-approaching new future.