Echoes of tomorrow. Yes, today!
BBA Gallery presents "echoes of tomorrow. yes, today!" during Berlin Art Week 2024. The title of the exhibition plays with the juxtaposition of future resonances and the awareness of the present. It conveys a sense of immediacy and relevance. The "yes, today!" emphasises excitement and urgency and invites viewers to actively engage with the themes of memory, imagination and the evolving technological and media landscape. This title is ambiguous and encourages us to utilise the potential of today to understand yesterday, while hinting at the visions of tomorrow.
Featuring five pioneering artists from its pool who deal with the two major themes of memory and imagination, Verena Bachl, Rhys Himsworth, Chirag Jindal, Sven Winszus and WHYIXD present their latest artwork. In doing so, we explore the central question of how memory and imagination develop in a diverse landscape characterised by art, technology and media and how they are interwoven.
There are many artists who are curious about technology and the different media outlets available to them, and so they should be. Artists are experimental, clever and culturally hack tech and media together to produce a creative outcome. However, who is really doing it beyond the overeasy conceptualisation or taking it beyond a tech thrill. And by this, the art is tested by its ability to stand further than the short life of any given tech hype. The artists we are exhibiting at BBA Gallery defy this in a provocative way, they question our relationship with ourselves, with nature. Both imagination and memory are fundamental aspects of human cognition that have been significantly influenced by technology and media.
Using media and technology to blur boundaries, bend genres, document the unseen, taking the art to mysterious uncharted realms where imagination and memory interlace one another. These artists are using collective and personal memory to trigger imagination. Imagination, when recalled repeatedly, can internally serve as vivid or distorted memory, crystallising in the form of a personal myth or used to bring new perspectives to our collective thinking. Ambitious and skilled usage of technological tools, with adventurous orientation over the media landscape. These artists and their works put the brakes on our attention seeking economy and society. They stand in stasis and test the metre of time.