Thinking about Thinking about the future

A new group exhibition, developed over the lockdown period, that thinks about the future through the current moment.

If this era of pandemic-driven flux could be visualised, what would it look like? In the past few months, feelings of uncertainty have combined with decisive action to create a future that seems constantly just out of reach. If these strange times could tell us anything, however, it is that the future is always just out of reach, like a strange new constellation of stars in the distant sky or a rainbow appearing intermittently on the horizon.

This exhibition brings together new and existing work to create a reactive constellation; one that could only happen now, as society collectively emerges from a place of contemplation, of rāhui and of isolation.

“Thinking About Thinking About the Future” is also the title of sociologist Chamsy El-Ojeili’s introduction to Landfall 216. The 2008 issue, titled Utopias, suggests that in reflecting on our future (or futures) we should think of history as a messy accumulation of partly realised visions of the future, rather than as a sequence of events. Landfall is Aotearoa’s longest running arts and literary journal.

Featuring: Anna Sew Hoy, Dane Mitchell, Edith Amituanai, Josephine Cachemaille, Paul Cullen, Laura Duffy and Aliyah Winter with InsideOUT. Curated by Chloe Geoghegan.

Additional writing on the exhibition will be available to download later in the programme.

Image: Preliminary still by Laura Duffy and Aliyah Winter with InsideOUT