The group exhibition “Light Chimes at the Edge of Time”

Description

What if science fiction no longer imagines the future, but reveals a present we do not yet understand?

The exhibition brings together seven artists whose work engages with science fiction in one way or another and explores the possibilities of science fiction within the exhibition format, asking whether sci-fi has become a nostalgic image of futures that never came to pass, whether it remains a genre oriented towards and preoccupied with the future, or whether it has become something else entirely.

Since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, modern science fiction – or simply sci-fi – has stimulated the human imagination by envisioning what does not yet exist. Philosophically, science fiction is one of the most sustained experiments of the past few centuries. It connects imagination with knowledge, speculation with materiality, and asks what the world might be like if we were to alter some of its underlying assumptions. It has produced images of other planets, technologies, societies and futures. In its classic conception, science fiction is located somewhere ahead of us: in a place where reality might theoretically arrive one day. But, increasingly, it seems that the future is no longer there, ahead of us; it may be a condition we already inhabit, already projected into our present.

“What happens when a system can no longer describe reality, yet continues to produce an endless stream of descriptions? It seems that contemporary science fiction occupies precisely this point of contact, where our descriptions meet reality, spill over into it, and reality continues on. In her Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway wrote that the boundary between science fiction and social reality is merely an optical illusion. “Light Chimes at the Edge of Time” examines this boundary and its immediate surroundings as a place where something is taking shape, making itself visible, audible, perceptible, comprehensible or simply known,” the artists explain.

The exhibition has no single curator; its final form has emerged through a shared process of discussion and creative practice among the artists, in which the symbiosis between works creates opportunities for new worlds and new encounters.

Artists: Katrin Enni, Sandra Ernits, Marten Esko, Mihkel Ilus, Olev Kuma, Holger Loodus and Solveig Lill

Graphic design by: Tüpokompanii

Thanks: Alejandro Montes de Oca, Claudia Schnugg, Eesti kunstiakadeemia, Elena Pietrini, perekond Ernits, Hans Lillemets, Jan Schacher, Julius Thomas, Katariina Tamm, Margus Elizarov, Mihkel Raev, Mihkel Tomberg, RepliFate võrgustik, Silpa-Mary Johnson, Taavi Teevet, Tanel Paliale, Virginia Pasti

The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

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