In current art practice, contemporary artists are increasingly engaging with the unfulfilled promises of the 20th century. In this process they revisit key moments of history and explore their significance for the present. This emerging trend is best reflected by a phrase in Otolith I by the Otolith Group: “to sift through the tense present of the last century. Looking for the critical points. The thresholds. Searching for moments of becoming that can tell me how they became us.” In the exhibition The Futures of the Past, works of three artists addressing this quest for significant moments of the last century are brought together in a tense dialogue. In the exhibition, the works of Annette Amberg, Asier Mendizabal y Yelena Popova dialogue while exploring notions of communities and how art anticipated in their conceptual formation – a core preoccupation of the historic Avant-Garde. Their works centre on the question of how society can be reconceptualised with respect to this historical experience and which role art might have in this endeavour today.
Acción Cultural Española collaborates in this project supporting the Spanish artist Asier Mendizabal, who is specially interested in the potential of human gatherings as a forum for variability and resistance. In a variety of works, he investigates how assemblies of people are visually represented and how forms of folk culture and high art are involved in symbolizing a group’s identity. In his series Figures & Preἀguration (2009), Mendizabal photographed scenes of mass formations and put them together as montages and collages in shapes taken from photo-montages of the historical Avant-Garde. For Mendizabal these are the earliest visual political representations of the formati-on of the masses. In text-based and sculptural works, Mendizabal addresses the competition between Abstrac-tion and Realism, a central issue of art-history in the 20th century, with regards to their claim to represent different ideals of community.
Acción Cultural Española collaborates in this project supporting the Spanish artist Asier Mendizabal, who is specially interested in the potential of human gatherings as a forum for variability and resistance. In a variety of works, he investigates how assemblies of people are visually represented and how forms of folk culture and high art are involved in symbolizing a group’s identity. In his series Figures & Preἀguration (2009), Mendizabal photographed scenes of mass formations and put them together as montages and collages in shapes taken from photo-montages of the historical Avant-Garde. For Mendizabal these are the earliest visual political representations of the formati-on of the masses. In text-based and sculptural works, Mendizabal addresses the competition between Abstrac-tion and Realism, a central issue of art-history in the 20th century, with regards to their claim to represent different ideals of community.