Shaping the Future

»The future is not a utopian dream neatly detached from the present: the future has already begun.«
Robert Jungk

The need to imagine the future is deeply rooted in the human being. If we want to get an idea of tomorrow, various perspectives present themselves to us. Scientific projections and simulations follow a pragmatic, rational approach, films and books create fictitious concepts. The exhibition "Shaping the Future" assumes that both approaches – reality and imagination – are interdependent and interwoven. It conceives the future as a multidimensional temporal construct. In 2018, the scholars of Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral explored the topic "Shaping the Future. How do we want to live, love and work?" So, too, the artistic work of the scholars of the federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate, who were free to choose their topic, touches on this question. Because the starting point of many artistic positions originally is the consideration of when the future actually begins. In view of the relatively foreseeable duration of one's own life span, exploring the possibilities of the individual way of life in the here and now comes to the fore. Other artists consider the future as something that goes far beyond us and therefore requires a more global perspective. There is a consensus that our world faces complex social, environmental, political and economic challenges. The question of how we face tomorrow in view of global problems and the latest technological developments is also related to our emotional constitution. The often ambivalent interaction of hope and suspicion, pleasant anticipation and anxiety, faith and doubt resonates in many works. With the help of various media such as painting, sculpture, performance, video, photography, drawing, objects and installation, the artists address a multitude of topics: possible forms of coexistence, the relationship between man and machine, dealing with illness and death, mobility, the transformation of work, the opening up of new spaces. In a playful way the artistic results oscillate between concrete pictorial inventions and abstract figures of thought. They all lead to the fundamental question of how the comprehensive change of our times shapes and transforms present and future humanity. The exhibition is curated by Lotte Dinse, research associate at Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral.

Exhibiting artists
Laura Eckert, Florian Graf, Andrea Eva Györi, René Hüls, Ruth Hutter, The liveloveworkCollection, Soyoung Kim, Rieke Köster, Björn Kühn, Gregory Olympio, Nelmarie du Preez, Max Ruf, Lisa Marie Schmitt, Konstantin Voit, Till Wyler von Ballmoos