For many, the present seems incomprehensible and inexplicable. Although we are confronted daily with new diagnoses of the present–condensed into buzzwords such as digital change, post-factual age, migration society or climate crisis–we are losing our experience of the moment and of contemporaneity. Yesterday, today and tomorrow fall into one. The future is already happening in the present, which has not yet come to terms with the past. It seems that the present is either endless or disappearing altogether.
Against this background, the exhibition Our Present shows how artists relate to the present, and the forms that they give to it. The works exhibited address topics such as physicality, identity, politics and technology. By including different cultural contexts, in awareness of a common media sphere and its linkage of the past and the future, the exhibition opens up a multiple perspective to its viewers on differing ideas of the present today.
The exhibition Our Present marks the beginning of the 2020 programme under the artistic direction of Thomas Thiel, while simultaneously including a fresh presentation of the collections in the sense of revisualizing the past.
With contributions by Eric Baudelaire, Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Forensic Oceanography/ Forensic Architecture, Geumhyung Jeong, Hanne Lippard, Basim Magdy, Frida Orupabo, Wong Ping, Clemens von Wedemeyer