Futures Past

Morehshin Allahyari, Sarah Blome, Juan Covelli, Dominique Cro, Sandrine Deumier, Oliver Laric, Lawrence Lek, Kumbirai Makumbe, Entangled Others, Abi Sheng, Shinji Toya, Ryan Vautier, Matteo Zamagni

Arebyte presents Futures Past, a group show as part of Arebyte's 2022/23 programme Sci-Fi which looks at fictioning and alternative futures through a series of exhibitions, live performances, online experiences and educational activities.

Futures Past takes the viewer on an immersive journey through the excavated ruins of the future filled with digital and sculptural works, interactive and static assets, as well as AI-generated renderings to contextualise the disparate findings. The gallery becomes a site for discovering fragments of media, objects and genre-fluid artwork documenting the perceived notion of futurity through retrospective, historical, orthographical, geological and temporal dimensions.

Mimicking archaeological digs and touristic attractions of historical sites, the exhibition presents digital works that encapsulate ideas around the past, present and future: amalgamated beings, mixed histories, clashes of culture, and worlds within worlds. The works are portrayed as excavated entryways and fragmented and disbanded relics - a puzzle to piece together. We are asked to reimagine the way artefacts are viewed, recounted and told, as well as how they can assist us in denouncing colonial pasts, speculating, narrating, and unpacking the multiple crises in which we find ourselves. The works posit radical views of the future that don’t rely on the retelling of big tech fantasies of power, control and subversion that are built from colonial imaginings, capitalist, patriarchal and imperialist ideologies, but instead emancipate us from the complacency we have been acclimated to. What might become of the future we will never inhabit is not clear - we know where the future is but not entirely what it is. The exhibition covers four modes of seeing - this is not to presume what the future will look like but rather to think about how the future is seen through the lenses of past, present, future and preservation. Adopting the notions Benjamin Noys puts forward, this could be rephrased as “de-inventing” the future and returning to the present as a “fraught and fragmentary site of struggle.”

The gallery takes on a new purpose as a site for archiving and preservation; a mediator for concepts of futurity whose glitched screens and leaky disc spaces are identifiable as belonging to our present, the early twenty-first century, but whose artefacts belong to another time. Now in recovery and recontextualised as excavated portals (a temporal non-place) the works seek renewed attention and frameworks, they become ominous adages as well as bright suspicions of tomorrow. The works have been found to remind us of possible, probable and preferable futures (to adopt the language from Futures Thinking theory) and ask how technology can assist in developing more of an understanding of the hereafter.