黑料不打烊

The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030鈥�2100 is a major exhibition project that brings together historical and new works by over 50 Russian and international artists and will occupy the entire museum building. It takes a look at a future already in the making, when the environmental agenda will become one of the main political questions.

The suggested timeline references two widely speculative points in time taken from the sphere of popular science and iconic science fiction: 2030 is suggested as the year when existing resources of oil will be exhausted (Paul R. Ehrlich, Beyond the Limit, 2002), putting an end to the Oil Age; and 2100 denotes the year that, according predictions made by Arthur C. Clarke in the 1960s, human life will be able expand to other star systems. The exhibition alludes to a compressed period of time starting from the not too distant future, when the human race will be forced to live with the final knowledge that 鈥榯here is no planet B, 鈥� through to future imagined in the past, in which humans were expected to progress sufficiently to be able to settle on other planets.

By looking into the speculative future, the boundaries of which are determined by predictions that are no longer considered accurate, the exhibition highlights the uncertainty of our knowledge about events to come, while suggesting a 鈥減erformative鈥� understanding of the future as it is being constructed today and shaped by our activities in the present. As theorist and critic T.J. Demos put it in his article Art After Nature (2012): 鈥淛ust as nature is no longer understood as a pristine and discrete realm apart from human activity, art鈥漵 autonomy is all the more untenable when faced with ecological catastrophe.鈥�

The Coming World is developed around two main concepts: environmentalism and ecology. The first gives real urgency to the agenda of our relationship to nature, putting forward the idea that still marginalized topics such as climate change, species extinction, pollution, renewable energy, and overpopulation should be central to building alternative patterns of education, consumption, production, and leisure. This also means considering nature in an expanded field and interlinking biological, technological, social and political ecologies. The second concept, ecology, is understood as ecology in action, an insuppressible process where nature, human and other-than-human co-perform, or the world as a performed ecology and an ecology performing itself. This allows us to think of nature in embodied, active, distinctly relational terms whereby production of new knowledge is possible within the transcendent as well as everyday knowing of nature.