Kunstraum Lakeside | Statements 2021

Archeology of the future or a prospective past? Future II, or, as this tense is also called: future perfect is a paradoxical grammatical construction. Those who use this tense to make a statement about the world create facts that do not exist yet. They describe the completion of an action in the future from a past perspective. This "will have done" downright runs past itself. However, future perfect is always highly uncertain. The linear progression of current conditions is one of the driving forces behind economic and technological developments. At the same time, there is a lack of visions for a better tomorrow, overshadowed by the desire to return to a better yesterday, which in fact never really existed.

With its annual program Future Perfect, Kunstraum Lakeside draws upon the program of Future I, which was conceived exactly 10 years ago. The curators at the time stated that "grand concepts of the future command little political or media prominence, while engagement with utopias and radical social blueprints do however constitute an important theme for contemporary art and theory". Little has changed a decade later. In light of the tangible implications of global warming and the erosion of familiar (geo)political orders, the situation has become even more critical: The future itself—as a horizon for actions and decisions—seems to have gone lost.

Hence, the annual program 2021 at Kunstraum Lakeside will be centered around artistic explorations into what will perhaps have been. It is about how future can be created with artistic means—very concretely in the here and now. Parallel to future solutions, which are being elaborated at Lakeside Science and Technology Park on a daily basis and a variety of levels, the artists speculatively intervene in a future that leaves behind everything taken as a given.

Further information: https://www.lakeside-kunstraum.at/en/statements-opencall-2021/