Futureless
Group Exhibition
18.09.2020 - 10.10.2020
With imagination and fiction as tools, the Futureless group exhibition presents the myriad possibilities of queer/feminist futures within our increasingly digitized and ecologically precarious planet.
A generation of artists is emerging who view the dreams of economic progress and unlimited growth at their end. Simultaneously, we are witnessing the extent of humanity’s damage to the globe becoming exposed. The loss of a future once thought by some as great and bright leaves us in a futureless state. Such a state may feel at once empty and ominous, yet also appear as a promising site for speculative fiction and fantasy. From an insightful standpoint, queer/feminist voices articulately shine through this futureless void, offering visions of how society can be continuously shaped and reshaped differently. What does it mean for queer/feminist thought and art that the future is missing? How can we dream of and interpret the present as seen from the future?
The artists participating in the Futureless group exhibition speculate on these questions and more, recognizing an important history of queer/feminist futurism. Drawing from this historical sensitivity, Futureless understands queer/feminist lives as existing within an ecosystem; in a constant exchange with the rest of nature and society that renders them as interdependent. In this way, various worlds, or perhaps universes, emerge from the artworks, performances, workshops, and lectures that are presented during Futureless, worlds that detail imaginative proposals for queer/feminist futures, with fiction and reality appearing in unentanglable forms. Standing before a backdrop formed by the ever-shifting relations between human beings and the globe, Futureless looks forward, viewing the emerging political and ideological void as an opportunity to envision queer/feminist dreams of future life.
Curated by Oliver Dougherty.
Participating artists:
Clay AD
Niya B
Zhen Guo
Areej Huniti & Eliza Goldox
Maria Kulikovska with Uleg Vinnichenko
Zoë Marden
Fallon Mayanja
Joanne Newman
Max Puorro, Eddy Levin, Helah Cooper & Danielle Magee
Heather Renée Russ
Anna M. Szaflarski
Exhibited Works:
Maria Kulikovska with Uleg Vinnichenko (ARC/SW)
Constitution of Autonomous Republic Xena-Maria
Watercolor on migration service documents and book, 2020
Kulikovska is a multidisciplinary artist, architect, researcher, and feminist activist in exile. Currently based between Kyiv and Sweden, Kulikovska was born and grew up in the Crimea peninsula, to which she cannot return since its annexation by Russian forces; Kulikovska has been declared by the DPR (Donetsk People’s Republic) as a “degenerative artist.” Since 2017, Kulikovska has produced all of her works with architect and researcher Uleg Vinnichenko.
Premiering during Futureless, the Constitution of the Autonomous Republic Xena-Maria is an ongoing series of watercolor paintings on original migration documents collected over the past seven years by Kulikovska from various countries. The documents detail the artist’s bureaucratic trail of migration; applying for visas, residence permits, registration as an IDP from Crimea after its annexation as well as multiple refusal letters. The works are part of the research process for a fictional book currently being written by Kulikovska on her alter-ego “Xena from the forbidden land.” For the artist, her home in the occupied Crimea represents a forbidden land, unenterable because of military repression and socially-constructed borders. By imaginatively using the very documents that represent her marginalization as an IDP (internally displaced person) as source material, Kulikovska searches beyond these forms of state oppression. She contemplates her own future as an exiled feminist artist, while asking the viewer to reflect on how borders, conflict, and the nation-state are affecting women worldwide, and whether they may be one day abolished.
Heather Renée Russ (US)
Tidewrack
Video Installation, sculpture, sound and prints (duration: 2.2 minutes, looped), 2019
Brooklyn-based American interdisciplinary artist Heather Renée Russ’ work brings together photography, video, installation, and sculpture to consider queer-feminist representation on a damaged planet.
While Maria Kulikovska’s work considers the implications of borders between nations, Heather Renée Russ’ Tidewrack questions the future of ecological borders. The term tidewrack refers to the evolving space on a beach’s shoreline where organic and inorganic materials from the sea are washed up by the receding tide. In Russ’ installation, structured around a refracted video installation that depicts a group of queer-feminist artists, activists, and sex workers frolicking on the shoreline, the term is used as a metaphor for the meeting point of queer/feminist life and the rest of nature, with queer beaches providing a broader environmental framework and setting. As global warming and economic changes threaten coastlines, the queer community stands to lose these treasured spaces.
Tidewrack also presents sculptural works of enmeshed forms, developed by leaving queer-feminist relics such as wigs, fake eyelashes, and even anxiety medications to collide with natural marine elements on the shoreline. Russ then turned these objects into prints, depicting forms that resemble ocean creatures such as jellyfish. Consisting of elements developed during residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts, Tidewrack illustrates the entanglement between queer-feminist life within our increasingly threatened natural world.
Fallon Mayanja (FR)
Or the Inescapable III
Video and sound installation, (duration: 16.39 minutes, looped), 2020
Silent Oscillation
Video and sound installation, (duration: 5.0 minutes, looped), 2020
Relying on technology and electronics, the work of sound artist, performer, and educator Fallon Mayanja, based between Lisbon and Paris, explores the boundaries of bodies, identities and communities.
Presented in the form of sound and video installations for the first time during Futureless, Fallon Mayanja’s Or the Inescapable III and Silent Oscillation also speculate on the future of marginalized communities, taking the viewer into an introspective realm. Far from a linear vision of time, the sound pieces of both multimedia installations are collected from activist speeches from a digital archive, emphasizing the importance of historical awareness. They develop dialogs in which the future of Blackness, gender and sexuality are envisioned, intersticing the words of many together into a common narrative.
Or the Inescapable III probes the boundaries of bodies, identities and communities, questioning the role of knowledge transmission with both queer-feminist and Afrofuturist considerations at hand. Silent Oscillations considers who has the ability to speak and who is silenced, as well as whose bodies and voices are controlled and by whom.
Both pieces include imagery from Mayanja’s performance Representation Or the Inescapable Fact of Existence, including a performer who moves as if they are the speaker of the dialogue. Neither male nor female but masked, their presence further questions what is heard. Mayanja’s installations act as spaces to listen, remember, and reflect on the future of communities, as well as the importance of learning from those that came before us when reshaping the world.
Anna M. Szaflarski (DE)
Will you please be quiet?
Video (duration: 1.17 minutes, looped), 2009
Anna M. Szaflarski is a Berlin-based visual artist, writer and artist book publisher. Using media such as illustration, installation or video, her intimate work traces emotional aspects of the psyche.
Szaflarski’s video Will you please be quiet? provides space for the viewer to feel a sense of release amounted to by feminist struggles for emancipation. In her short video, four common domestic items appear as if they are falling autonomously from the sky; rejected by a great force, like a planetary immune system that expels them to the Earth’s surface. Each object hits the ground hard and fast, over and over until they are destroyed by the impact. The video acts as a visual representation and metaphorical enactment of dismantling the domestic space, along with its structures and social expectations; gender, sexuality, family units, and so on. Will you please be quiet? highlights the liberating possibilities of deconstructing gender and sexuality, looking towards a utopian future in which these concepts are not ruled by any tradition or custom.
Zhen Guo
Punching Bag
Textile-based installation (approximately 183 x 46 x 46cm each), 2016-2019
New York-based established artist Zhen Guo’s workplaces major emphasis on the expression of struggle and of recognition of women and other genders in a society dominated by male tradition.
The implications of the domestic when envisioning a feminist future are further drawn upon in Zhen Guo’s sculpture series Punching Bags, which rather pictures the household and craft-based traditions that have been historically relegated to women as sources of strength against patriarchal oppression. Guo’s sculpture demonstrates the resilience and survival of women by appropriating boxers’ punching bags and covering them with patchworked textile forms that resemble breasts. These multicolored breasts cover the sculpture, reclaiming the surface area of each brutish column to absorb impact and channel it into new growth.
Guo utilizes techniques such as patch-working and tapestry in her mixed media works to acknowledge the legacy of craft in feminist art, while also placing emphasis on the expression of struggle and of recognition of women in a society dominated by male tradition. Believing many women artists of her generation reject the assumption of gender in their work, particularly in her native China, Guo intentionally incorporates folk and community art forms to clearly identify the role of women within her work. The Punching Bags series has been exhibited internationally, including at Mana Contemporary Art, New Jersey, School of Visual Arts, New York and Jeonbuk Museum of Arts, South Korea.
Joanne Newman (UK)
Blanket for the Futureless
Crocheted leftover fabrics and pages of queer-feminist Sci-Fi, 2020
A Carrier Bag of Stars
Crocheted leftover fabrics, 2020
London-based Joanne Newman combines high & low cultural references with personal desires and autobiographical motifs, drawing from influences as broad as lesbian pulp fiction, feminist science fiction and baroque art, to create sculptures, installations, publications and one-off events.
Like Szaflarski and Guo’s contributions to Futureless, Joanne Newman’s Blanket for the Futureless alongside A Carrier Bag of Stars also considers historically feminine crafts in the West, yet questions how such traditions may practically help us prepare for an uncertain future. Presented for the first time during Futureless, Newman’s piece features two textile installations; a blanket and bag both crocheted from leftover fabric. Netted into the open structure of the Blanket for the Futureless are fragments of queer-feminist science fiction texts, forming the threads that comfort our present and oncoming ambivalent futures. Similarly, Newman’s A Carrier Bag of Stars consists of a crocheted bag that references renowned feminist sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” In this theory, Le Guin highlights women as the earliest creators by stating that humanity’s first tool was a carrier bag for food, rather than a weapon. With some materials provided, the audience is invited to add their own visions of queer-feminist futures to the bag and to read those fragments offered within it. Providing warmth, comfort and hope for uncertain times, Newman’s installation emphasizes that we have one another, and the stories from ourselves and our queer-feminist visionaries to help us dream and generate new possibilities.
Areej Huniti & Eliza Goldox (JO/DE)
VOICES FROM THE INTERIOR
360 degree mixed reality video, VR Glasses, video, text, 2019
Areej Huniti and Eliza Goldox are an interdisciplinary artist duo working together since 2018 who use new media technologies to build virtual spheres based on speculative futures and fictions.
With ecofeminist futurist possibilities in mind, the generative potential of myth, fiction, and storytelling is central to Areej Huniti & Eliza Goldox’s VR installation VOICES FROM THE INTERIOR. Originally presented during their exhibition LIQUID ENTITIES at Darat al Funun in Amman, Jordan in 2019, this multilayered piece is based on the cosmological and mythological interrelations of a dried-up river in Amman.
VOICES FROM THE INTERIOR revolves around a 360º mixed reality intervention viewed through VR glasses. The immersive experience simulates the desiccated river that is now buried under urban buildings and human debris in Amman, re-imagining its present and future. When entering the virtual space, viewers are presented with a bridge or a plateau that floats on water, representing the mythical creature Bahamut, which is described in Arabic cosmography as the fish that carries the world on her back and in this instance represents femininity and worldliness. Three female voices can be heard, belonging to young women from Amman who were interviewed for the project about their own futures and that of the city, offering the immersant the chance to experience their desires and imaginations.
A silent archival video, as well as a text accompany the VR piece, providing historical and mythological context and questioning what the river once was, and what it could be.
Zoë Marden (UK)
Mermania: Tales of Tentacularity
Multimedia installation and Online Lecture/Performance (duration: 20 minutes), 2020
Zoë Marden is a multidisciplinary artist, curator and writer based in London who works with performance, video, text, sound, sculpture and installation, creating alternate worlds and speculative futures.
While Huniti & Goldox take the viewer to a near-forgotten river, Marden’s work ventures into the depths of the ocean to uncover mythical stories that propose ideas for ecofeminist and multispecies futures. Marden’s ongoing research into mermaids as monstrous feminine mythological creatures manifests itself in the immersive installation Mermania: Tales of Tentacularity. Sculptures of organic tentacles and shell-like forms punctuate the installation space, combining with ephemeral video works and silk prints from above and below that establish a multi-sensory experience.
Marden’s installation considers mermaids as fantastic, liminal beings that have been portrayed through fictional and pop-culture stories as at once divergent, undesirable and empowering. As Marden’s research enlarged to view the connections between various current crises, the artist perceived the connection between mermaids and tentacles, treating these limbs as a metaphor for the complex interdependencies between species and ideas. Marden references famed feminist scientific thinker Donna Haraway to imagine the tentacles of underwater creatures reaching out to “make kin”, to form symbiotic relations between various living beings. During the online event Symbiotic Storytelling, Marden presents a lecture/performance that builds upon the ideas of Haraway’s “tentacular thinking”, uncovering the potential of mermaids to blur borders between human and non-human, fictional and real.
Niya B
Hollow Spaces
Online performance (Duration: approximately 20 minutes), 2020
Niya B is a transfeminine artist based in London, working at the intersections of visual art, video and performance, engaging with themes of ecology, post-identity and transgender politics.
Also participating in the online event Symbiotic Storytelling as part of Futureless, Niya B’s performance Hollow Spaces brings the viewer with her into a transformative and futuristic underground cave. In Hollow Spaces, Niya B conducts a cathartic ritual in the depths of the Earth – a site imagined by the artist to enable release from humanity’s chaos. Incorporating video, text, and soundtrack, the artist engages with breath, flame, water, and words, producing labels for herself and then extinguishing them into nothingness. Positioned at the crossroads of transfeminism and posthumanism, Niya B questions how caves and other expanses of the Earth offer places removed from social structures, identities, digital surveillance and hypervisibility. Between the mineral formations and magnetic attractions of these empty spaces, the artist offers an act of healing, a means to rest from the heaviness of one’s identity in the madness of the “above world”. At once natural yet digital, the space below the Earth’s surface is presented in a virtual format, becoming hybrid and futuristic, while suggesting a possible evolution into posthuman beings. Besides, when we journey underground, how might this enchanting, otherworldly space transform who we are?
Hollow Spaces has previously been exhibited online for Occupying the In-Between, a virtual conference organized by Goldsmiths’ University of London.
Clay AD
Metabolize, If Able
Novel Readings, published in 2018
Clay AD was born on the edge of a genetically modified cornfield in Indianapolis, Indiana. Now based in Berlin, AD’s work deals with concepts of illness, ecology, science fiction, bodily transformation, DIY aesthetics and the politics and negotiations of care under capitalism. AD’s interdisciplinary process is a constellation of collective work, writing prose and poetry, music, dance, and collage.
While Niya B’s performance imagines an underground future for those who do not fit in, Clay AD presents correspondences sent from misfit clones in a dystopian future as the author reads and holds meditations from their novel Metabolize, If Able. Presented during the online event Symbiotic Storytelling, AD’s novel aims to challenge and nourish frameworks of queerness and disability. Through the incorporation of medical charts, self-help meditations, screenplays, and a series of letters, the hybrid novel follows the lives of clones and their spawn. For the clones, a corporation controls life and death, sickness, and wealth. Corporation doctors bring the clones to life and assign them work, but they live a draconian existence. The doctors restrict clone reproduction. They pathologize and withhold care. They keep the clones sick. The story then details the clones’ reckoning and retaliation from the corporation. Largely interested in the intersection of sci-fi and feminism, and taking cues from queer and feminist sci-fi writers such as N.K. Jemisin, AD explores dystopian futures with a queer-feminist lens.
Metabolize, If Able is available for purchase as an epub and physical edition through Arcadia Missa.
Maxine Puorro, Eddy Levin, Helah Cooper & Danielle Magee (USA/CA/CA)
Meandering, Articulations & Resonance: Play workshop!
Workshop and sculptural installation, 2020
Interdisciplinary artists Maxine Puorro, Eddy Levin & Helah Cooper come together in collaboration for the first time during Futureless, combining their extensive interdisciplinary backgrounds that span performance, dance, sculpture, textile, film and installation.
Puorro, Levin & Cooper’s workshop and sculptural installation Meandering, Articulations and Resonance offers a queer perspective on neurodivergent behavior and interaction by holding space in the present, in hope of forming a more empathic and caring future. The artists work with participants to collectively develop queer tools for interacting with future environments through sculpture, participation and performance.
As artists all diagnosed with forms of ADHD and autism spectrum disorder, Puorro, Levin & Cooper collaborate in a movement and improvisation workshop that emphasizes unconventional and gentle forms of behavior – of thinking-through-doing – as ways to celebrate rather than stigmatize neurological divergence. The workshop revolves around collective interaction with a set of playful, unconventional sculptural objects made by Puorro and Cooper that are installed in the gallery space throughout the exhibition. As phenomena such as social distancing and lockdowns drastically shift the way we interact with one another, Puorro, Levin & Cooper draw upon queer movement methods to reapproach and rethink communication and exchange. With performative and participatory tools at hand, the workshop underlines the importance of building a future in which our interaction with one another and the environment is seen through a queer lens.
Exhibition Program:
Symbiotic Storytelling
Online Event: Reading, Performance
Tuesday, September 29th, 8:00 pm
During the live online event Symbiotic Storytelling, a selection of performances and readings from Niya B, Clay AD and Zoë Marden are presented, drawing attention to topics such as transfeminine posthumanism, dystopian politics of sickness and multi-species mythologies.
The event will be live-streamed at https://www.twitch.tv/somosberlin
Meandering, Articulations and Resonance
Workshop
Interdisciplinary artist Eddy Levin hosts two free workshops in which participants collectively engage with a set of sculptural objects produced by Max Puorro, Helah Cooper & Danielle Magee.
Meandering, Articulations and Resonance will consist of two separate workshops, taking place on September 30th and October 1st, at 7-8:30 pm on both evenings.
Trans, non-binary and neurodivergent participants are especially welcome, with free spots being allocated to other participants when available.
Max 6 participants for each workshop.
Entry is free, wearing masks and social distancing required.
Sign up by emailing [email protected].
Links:
Listen to the podcast interview about Futureless on Art Next Door, a bi-weekly radio program on Keith F’eM, organized and hosted by Berlin-based Turkish curator and art writer Tuçe Erel.
Read the interview with Futureless curator Oliver Dougherty by Brasilian scholar and visual artist Marcia Vaitsman, PhD.
Futureless – Group exhibition curated by Oliver Dougherty
September 18th – October 10th, 2020, Tuesday-Saturday 2-7 pm
Entry free, RSVP required
SomoS, Kottbusser Damm 95, 1.0G, 10967 Berlin (U8 – Schönleinstraße)
