If Yesterday Was Tomorrow What Is Today

26 November 2020 - 20 February 2021

»What seems natural to us is probably just something familiar in a long tradition that has forgotten the unfamiliar source from which it arose. And yet this unfamiliar source once struck man as strange and caused him to think and to wonder.« Martin Heidegger

If Yesterday Was Tomorrow What Is Today presents emerging positions with notes on contemplation in Minimalism, Neo-Expressionism, Drawing and Painting. The themes are centered on the scenarios of solitude, phobia, of desire and radical doubt in the artist’s studio. The disruption that societies experience in a pandemic, in the fractured cracks of time, in systematic faults of truth and a political turmoil of facts; in elections, through violent state power; it rises in movements, it oscillates between impatience, silence and inquietude in transitional times. When meanings are inconstant, yet remain the same, time eludes its expediency. 

 

»What seems natural to us is probably just something familiar in a long tradition that has forgotten the unfamiliar source from which it arose. And yet this unfamiliar source once struck man as strange and caused him to think and to wonder.« Our reliance on the current interpretation of things is only seemingly well-founded, Martin Heidegger made a notable impact on time and being in subsequent philosophy and art theory. The history of arts is a history of pigments and dyes, oils, acrylics, silver nitrate and gelatine, one could use them to paint, to make a photograph, to print and in the contemporary artistic production of today. Images have begun to intervene in everyday life, their functions changing from representation to activation, operation and enforcement. 

 

If Yesterday Was Tomorrow What Is Today presents a generation of emerging artists who grew up with the internet, in a constant state of ecological crisis and debate about immigration. The themes are centered on the scenarios of solitude, phobia, desire and radical doubt in the artist’s studio. On historical acts of displacement and trauma, opposed with the potency of isolation and of inherent instability in interconnected worlds, we see the need for new ways to construct visual archives and emphasize the contemporary production  of today. 

 

 

Text: Katharina Balgavy