30 October 2018

Barcelona. In the Open or in Stealth.

From October 31 - March 17, 2019 at MACBA.

In the Open or in Stealth. The unruly presence of an intimate future is curated by Raqs Media Collective. This exhibition will be a multi-layered site of discovery that explores the concept of a future in which multiple histories and geographies are placed in dialogue, giving way to a plurality of possibilities and queries by following paths that interlace, entwine and expose relations between objects, feelings and concepts, while simultaneously tracing indeterminate spaces between them.

In the Open or in Stealth. The Unruly Presence of an Intimate Future. Exhibition views. Foto: Miquel Coll.

John Gerrard. X. laevis . Simulació, 2017. Cortesia de l’artista i Thomas Dane Gallery.

It is said that we know more about faraway galaxies than we do about the bottom of the oceans on Earth. One could say something similar about our relationship to the future.

The distant future can seem more familiar than the deep present. We know it will come, regardless of whether or not we are around to witness it.

A realignment of resources, technologies and energies is taking place in the world right now. The intimation of this emergent ensemble, however, is faint and tangled. These trends, these new realities, are difficult to describe in the familiar languages of concert and conflict, affinity and antagonism, individuality and collectivity.

Can tomorrow’s blur be a provisionally high-resolution image for here, for now?

Intermittent rebellions, sometimes accompanied by cybernetic suicide or sometimes by rogue algorithm raves, rise in tandem with attempts to exorcise the ghosts that haunt the machinery of capital. This is both commonplace, and it is the news. Different tenses, the present continuous and the future imperfect, are murmuring at each other like long-distance lovers at two ends of a jagged chat line. Let us eavesdrop on this conversation.

In the Open or in Stealth. The Unruly Presence of an Intimate Future. Exhibition views.

Foto: Miquel Coll.

A working list of artists includes Rosa Barba, Jeamin Cha, Mark Chung, Liao Fei, John Gerrard, Geumhyung Jeong, Hassan Khan, Charles Lim, Cristina Lucas, Kabelo Malatsie, Dillon Marsh, Huma Mulji, Mehreen Murtaza, Joe Nishizawa, Nontsikelelo Mutiti, Bahar Noorizadeh, Lucy Parker, Racter, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Muhannad Shono, Tito Zungu and including new commissions as the projects by Rupali Gupte y Prasad Shetty, Bhagwati Prasad, Rohini Devasher, Abhishek Hazra, Ivana Franke, Lantian Xie, Marzia Farhana will be presented as well as the intervention by the Raqs Media Collective.

An extension of the exhibition will be a mediation programme – titled the 21 Personae – which will explore the urban fabric of society through real-life stories of Barcelona’s diverse inhabitants. The project puts the Museum in dialogue with the city, resulting in a collection of urban chronicles.

In the Open or in Stealth. The Unruly Presence of an Intimate Future. Exhibition views. Foto: Miquel Coll

Raqs Media Collective was founded in 1992 by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. Artists curators, researchers, editors and philosophical agents provocateurs, the Collective’s work addresses connectedness, temporality and plenitude, and places them at the intersection of art, historical enquiry and philosophical speculation.

Information of exhibition

Títle: In the Open or in Stealth. Dates: October 31 - March 17, 2019.

Organisation: MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Curators: Raqs Media Collective: Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi and Monica Narula.

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