„We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. […] We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist. […] A racing automobile, a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. […] Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. […] We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman. […] „
These are the opening words of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's pre-fascist "Futurist Manifesto" from 1909. The text, which shaped art and society for generations, propagates and glorifies everything on which our present is based, from which it has to recover today and for which counter-models have to be developed: speed and technology, acceleration and industrialised profit maximisation, war and militarism, aggression and masculinity, rejection of the past, academic science, nature and everything feminine.
Against this background, the group exhibition Re: FUTURE (draft) shows different positions, analyses and sketches dedicated to the "future of the future". The artists' works share a simultaneously utopian and dystopian, sometimes anachronistic, sometimes exhausted approach to the present and the past. Circling around the question: (How) is the future still conceivable?, they refer to alternative concepts of coexistence, of thinking about the world, community and environment, work with references to the past and sketch cautious drafts towards a potentially - post-futuristic - future.
Many thanks to Ulrich Nausner for curatorial support.