Barakat Contemporary is proud to present The Archive of Unattained Futures, the solo exhibition of Alex Verhaest from 8 June to 31 July 2022 at the Barakat Seoul location. It is Verhaest's first solo exhibition in Korea and Asia at large, after her two-person exhibition in the same location in 2017.
The Archive of Unattained Futures displays ambitious new works developed by the artist for the past three years: The Archivist (2022), a 60-channel interactive video installation in which archival images from various public domains are transformed and composited, and Ad Hominem (2022), a video game, which philosophically interrogates utopian thinking. The works together elaborate a ludic cinematic space, an interactive science fiction film. Interweaving the multilayered epic is Change, the protagonist of the story. Here, Change, which by definition is the act or the instance of difference in states, is not the overarching force that advances the plot. There is a human body to it, the one that travels across time and converses with strangers and old friends. All the works are interactions with and depictions of Change, shifting according to what Change does and represents.
As one enters the gallery, one is confronted with a dark monolith erected in the middle of the space. On the quadrilateral structure, fifteen small screens on each side are quietly and quite solemnly animated. The monolith is Alex Verhaest's _Archivis_t. And delicately accompanying the monumental project is a double-sided tondo: the Island of the Day Before / the Island of the Day After (2022), slowly rotating in mid-space.
In Archivist, which comprises four chapters: the Oasis, Capsule, Bazaar, and Hub, with fifteen videos per chapter, the narrator reads in a mechanical voice the letters written by Change about their journey to the four utopias in the names of the chapters mentioned above. These utopias reference the four types of utopias theorised by scholar Sofie Verraest's doctoral dissertation Eutopia Unbound: Imagining Good Places in Narratives from 1945 to the Present (2016), which directly inspired Verhaest's entire series in the exhibition. In this study, Verraest claims that these utopia types incessantly appear in the modernist imaginations of places in post-war Western literature, architecture, films, and others. Centred around either collective or individual protagonists with either progressive or conservative ideologies imagine and depict 'good places' in the narratives of various art forms. For example, the Oasis and the Hub are led by collective protagonists inclining towards conservative and progressive ways of life respectively. They can be summarised as communitarianism and futurism in the same order. The utopias with individual protagonists: the Capsule, representing isolationism, leans towards a conservative view and the Bazaar, hedonism, denotes a progressive tendency towards divergence. These visions are further characterised by culturally stereotypical imaginations of modernity towards a better future, towards change.
Each utopia in Archivist is emblematised by an animated symbol: clouds in Oasis, explosions of light in Bazaar, models and masks in Capsule, and telescopes in Hub. The gently moving emblems are like a recurring dream, an association that persists, connecting together the heterogeneous archival images and the time periods they belong to. The classification can also be seen in Ad Hominem, where the four levels of the game, again representing the four utopias, are colour-coded. Oasis is illustrated by blue-green, Capsule in grey, Bazaar in pink, and Hub in navy.
In the first-person narrative Ad Hominem, the viewer and/or the game player plays the role of Change who returns to their hometown and meets old friends and lovers with the aforementioned utopian ideologies. As the game progresses the characters attempt to persuade in what Change should bring into the future, and always proposes two oppositional options. The game moves forward by selecting only one answer from the bifurcating paths. Eventually leading to an 'event' planned in celebration of Change's return, Change ultimately realises that they are not really welcome.
As shown above, the frameworks of the four utopias are expressed in a diagrammatic manner with clear boundaries in both Archivist and Ad Hominem. These visual and narrative gestures of the artist mimic the repetitive injection of aesthetic codes and ideals, a familiar tactic to many in various campaigns, especially the ones with socio-political agenda.
On the other hand, the script for both Archivist and Ad Hominem is written by Verhaest in collaboration with GPT-3, an artificial intelligence that uses deep learning based on 67 billion books, wikipedia's, and other various texts published on the internet to produce human-like texts. The text poetically connotes each utopian ideal with at times repeating words and sentences, vivid and tactile portrayal of the surreal symbols, and dreamlike associations of disparate events. Such uncanny Kafkaesque narration is heightened by the surreal exaggeration of the characters' faces, contrasted against the stark, realistic depiction of the surrounding environment. The aesthetics can be considered the trademark of the artist, visible from early on in her past works. And it is an approach that opens up for more creative and malleable navigation of constructed worlds, and for further variations and plural meanings. By interpreting the extreme views of the future in a delicate and beautiful cinematic language of variation, Verhaest reminds us that the departure point of utopia is the human imagination, and communicates the infinite possibilities that reality rather than the ideal can provide.
Grounded in the domain of experimental film, Alex Verhaest has been invested in diverse forms of narratives and how they are propagated and informed by relevant social intricacies. One may primarily consider the new technology and its social impact as one of the artist's main concerns from her innovative usage of interactive technologies in the past works such as the 'Temps Mort' (2013) series; however, more so than the fascination with the novelty, Verhaest zooms in on what the various media are capable of containing and conveying, and what continues to live on and what gets left out in the convergence of different spaces and temporalities.
Deeming the cinematic space as one of the most communicatively affective media, the artist uses it as a container, which can be continuously expanded and interrogated. As Sofie Verraest put it, '[s]eeing narrative as a universal practice,' the artist detects different media that are 'culturally and historically variable.' Sofie Verraest's thesis on the pattern of narratives was pertinent to this particular case of Alex Verhaest's expanded cinema that span an installation and a videogame. Change, which Verhaest imposes as a singular constant, is functionally innate to any narrative, and it is also often instigated particularly for a socio-political scheme, just like the monolith to mark an ideological victory reminding the generations to come. But here in the Archive of Unattained Futures, just like the rotating portrait of Change depicted in the Island of the Day Before / the Island of the Day After, Verhaest is questioning if the socio-political agenda and its formal manifestations have already become innate, and that it is a past form that one confuses with a futurist vision.
The pandemic, which stirred up an indisputable 'change' in humanity since early 2020, had unlocked yet again the extreme aspects of society, that are polarised collective idealisms either extremely negative or positive about the future. Through this exhibition, Verhaest posits that these oppositional ideologies not only repeat continuously throughout history but also perpetuate as aesthetical stereotypes in various genres of arts, and questions if these have not already dominated our subconscious. Moreover, in line with the artist's ongoing investigation of methodologies and forms of narratives, traversing timeless classics and new technologies, Verhaest reviews how we accept change, and if the imagination of the future triggered by change is actually futuristic, via a cyclical and complex flow of time that cannot be affixed in linear temporality.
Press release courtesy Barakat Contemporary.
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