inventing the past | group show

The international group exhibition inventing the past follows directly in the footsteps of the previous presentation entitled chasing another tomorrow. This second chapter illustrates a temporal change in perspective. This new point of departure presents us with a fictional narrative of the future, and by experimenting between time horizons, exposes the view of present systems and structures. The artistic positions are united in their conceptual approach, as well as in their questioning of the technological effects on human existence.

The exhibition traces the formal issues of conceptual art of the 1970s from the perspective of a younger generation of artists. Reflecting upon the current times, technological progress is put in relation to the high sensitivity of our natural environment. The ties between people, technology and nature reveal the field of tension from which the works draw a complex significance, amassed out of technical components, geometric shapes and natural elements. The gallery is transformed into a kind of mystical landscape, in which natural and technoid elements enter into a dialogue and allow various different histories to be written.

This Viewing Room foregrounds the individual artistic positions and works and offers an insight into the artists' work beyond the works in the exhibition.

French-Algerian artist Neïl Beloufa's (*1985 in Paris, FR) video works, sculptures, and installations focus on today's society permeated by digital technology, its value systems, and representational strategies. His artistic language reveals poetic overlays of reality and fiction on current issues ranging from power relations, digital surveillance, and nationalist ideologies to questions of identity, environmental awareness, and a postcolonial understanding of the world. In doing so, Beloufa references the aesthetics of video games, reality TV, and political propaganda, thus using the vocabulary of the information age to create complex and precisely crafted works that call for rethinking beliefs and stereotypes. 

Neïl Beloufa La Morale de l'Histoire, 2019 (detail) | Courtesy the artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles | Photo: Andrea Rossetti

"The news spread through the desert, and whole troupes of fennecs descended on the waterhole each with a little pebble between his or her teeth. They each fantasised about a different paradise."

→ full text of The Morals of the Story

Neïl Beloufa's Screen Talk, originally filmed in 2014, is a web-based miniseries and online game that depicts a world ravaged by a major pandemic and whose main characters are doctors, academics, and civilians, all quarantined for a novel respiratory virus, communicating with each other in awkward ways via video conference.

→ play Screen Talk here

Photo: Neïl Beloufa, Screentalk (Screenshot)

"In my work I question the common idea that we are the center of our cosmos."

– Lou Jaworski

Keith Sonnier was one of the first artists in the 60s and 70s to interconnect neon light and communication structures. He assisted in materializing the spatial and cultural logic of these systems into real space with the help of the unique perceptual properties of neon light. In addition to the dissolution of the material weight of the sculpture through light, Sonnier revolutionized the concept of sculpture through his use of industrial materials such as neon, latex, foam and aluminum.

Sonnier saw work with light in relation to new technologies of his time. For him, neon gas, which emits a diffuse, amorphous glow, floated in the atmosphere, as intangible and unfixed as radio waves and satellite data. Like these technologies, neon appeared to be limitless, the radiating waves of light visualizing a world where distances diminished and communication was possible in a short time. He was also one of the first artists to experiment with NASA satellite systems, bringing neon together with communication structures and helping to materialize the spatial and cultural logic of these systems, using the unique perceptual properties of neon light in real space.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

"[...] the most overpowering thing about Send/Receive—the media is so completely politically controlled and the focus became less and less about making work as illustrating this huge propaganda tool. Acquiring that tool was the political thrust — making that tool culturally possible."

– Keith Sonnier

The four-color lithograph Signal (1978) is one of the rare prints in Keith Sonnier's oeuvre and shows his intense involvement with the emerging technologies of the 1960s and 70s, such as satellite communication systems. During this period, Sonnier cooperated with the U.S. space agency NASA to send live video and text into space, testing the potentials and limitations of the new possibilities for information exchange. For Sonnier, who was interested in exploring new materials and media, satellites epitomized a utopian future in which spatial expansion through new communication technologies meant a way to build cultural bridges and transcend conventional material boundaries. Signal visualizes on a large scale this immaterial expansion through the graphic representation of communication waves, grids and lines.