THE FUTURE WON'T BE LONG NOW

SARAH CROWNER, RAQUE FORD, JULIAN HOEBER, MARGUERITE HUMEAU, BODYS ISEK KINGELEZ, MERCEDES LLANOS, JACOB MASON-MACKLIN, BRIAN OAKES, AMINA ROSS

MARCH 2 - APRIL 1, 2023

Someday is pleased to announce The Future Won't Be Long Now, March 2 - April 1, 2023.

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The future is not a natural dimension, but a collective hallucination; a distortion of the present. Western fidelity to causal logic creates an illusion of predictability, while also undermining the active role perception and imagination play in ensuing events. Historically, our concept of the future has been inextricably linked to the exploration (and exploitation) of physical space. Motivated-perception and profiteering led to cultural movements that championed the presumed promise of technological advancement.

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Today, the recent past and near future become history almost instantaneously, resulting in a sense of immanence, as if “history is snapping on our heels, following us like our shadows, like death.”1 With every inch of the planet colonized and the feeling of history accelerated, so has our idea of the future shifted. New movements reject grand narratives and the fetishization of speed and instead celebrate the very faculties that allow us to envisage alternative trajectories.

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“The Future Won’t Be Long Now” positions the future as both boundless phantom and mental catalyst. An emphasis on plasticity, play, and intersubjective experience challenges the rigid binaries of the Futurists while paying homage to their formal, material, and conceptual innovations. The works in the show are intentionally open-ended, suggesting the act of cognizance is as determinant to ensuing events as merely the passing of time. Adhering to the late Congolese sculptor Body Isek Kingelez’s definition of a “visionary” as “someone who dreams of what doesn’t exist yet,” the artists use speculation as a temporal loophole; a way to transcend the present by giving form to a myriad of possible futures - dystopian or utopian - and exploring the very perceptive faculties that enable us to do so. In Kingelez’s own words, each work: “represents the shape of my imagination. [They are] the very image of my ability to create a new world.”2

 

1. Marc Augé, “non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity,” Verso, London, 1995

2. Bodys Isek Kingelez, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018. Published in conjunction with the exhibition “City Dreams," May 26, 2018 - January 1, 2019, curated by Sarah Suzuki