THE NEW HUMAN: You and I in Global Wonderland
14 March–18 October 2015
Moderna Museet Malmö
Ola Billgrens plats 2-4
Malmö
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 11am–6pm
THE NEW HUMAN is a video-based exhibition project that artistically explores feelings of frustration, fear, bewilderment and confusion about our current human condition, while also presenting imagined scenarios of our future. The project is being exhibited at Moderna Museet Malmö in two comprehensive chapters: You and I in Global Wonderland in 2015 and Knock, Knock Is Anyone Home? in 2016. A third chapter will thereafter be presented at Moderna Museet in Stockholm in the fall of 2016.
You and I in Global Wonderland explores hopes and dreams, but also feelings of uncertainty, fear, and frustration about how people should and could live together in a new world. We get to share experiences of gigantic transformation and human migration brought on by war, climate change, and economic globalization. We are confronted with the widespread extremism of our time, and we are reminded of how our colonial past continues to affect the way we approach and treat one another today. As an exhibition, You and I in Global Wonderland may convey a sorrow for something lost, but it also presents us with feelings of tenderness, disorientation, and comedy, arising from the confrontations of cultures, languages, and lifestyles.
Knock, Knock is Anyone Home? catapults us further out into a virtual universe of hyper-real avatars and parallel worlds. Here we encounter human-looking characters that appear to have mutated with communication technologies and capitalist strategies to become something other, something that on the surface looks human but is fundamentally nonhuman. A number of the works seem to point towards a shift—perhaps a reversal of human evolution, or a transformation into something new. We enter worlds in which language can no longer be connected to what we see. Known categories dissolve, new amalgamations seem to be emerging, and the conditions on which human existence depends appear fundamentally uncertain. All works presented in THE NEW HUMAN have been produced since the year 2000, the turn of the millennium, and span from seminal contemporary classics to very recent productions. The project is the result of a substantial collaboration between Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf and Moderna Museet Malmö, and it includes work from both these collections as well as loans from individual artists.
Curator: Joa Ljungberg
Contributing artists: Ed Atkins, Trisha Baga, Yael Bartana, Robert Boyd, Loulou Cherinet, Ioana Cojocariu, Cao Fei, Esra Ersen, Isaac Julien, Helen Marten, Santiago Mostyn, Adrian Paci, Tomáš Rafa, Mika Rottenberg, Frances Stark, Ryan Trecartin, and Ferhat Özgür
