“HOPE” is a global group exhibition exploring areas of hope between science and fiction, curated by Bart van der Heide and Leonie Radine in collaboration with musician, theorist, and author DeForrest Brown, Jr. As the ultimate installment of the “TECHNO HUMANITIES” trilogy, “HOPE” probes the shut alliance between museums and the humanities as websites of lively world-building. The exhibition, which occupies the whole lot of the museum, consists of works from an intergenerational cohort of artists. It’s additional supported by an anthology of newly commissioned vital texts in addition to a wealthy mediation and occasion program.

Ever since opening its doorways precisely 15 years in the past, the Museion constructing has been repeatedly described as alien, a UFO that landed within the middle of Bolzano. “HOPE” endorses the view of the museum as a spaceship, a time capsule, a portal to a different dimension. The exhibition will rework Museion right into a manufacturing website of marvel, merging science and fiction to evoke hope by means of particular person and collective imaginations of futures and pasts. As Thinker Ernst Bloch wrote within the introduction of his Precept of Hope (1954): “We’d like probably the most highly effective telescope, that of polished utopian consciousness,” to penetrate the darkness.

“HOPE” invitations guests to maneuver between actual and imagined areas and occasions to attempt on various viewpoints. The exhibition structure suggests an upside-down, non-linear path by means of the constructing, main first to the fourth flooring, which showcases varied inventive time capsules in an observatory-like setting. By continuing by means of particular person and collective inventive cosmologies, the self and the opposite are open for exploration past a humancentric worldview. Right here, the choice of artworks creates a sci-fi ambiance between apocalyptic situations and new beginnings on the intersection of the humanities, expertise, ecology, and financial system.

Artists exhibiting on the third flooring interrogate new instruments and challenges within the period of synthetic intelligence and different types of digital worldbuilding. Their arcade-like installations create immersive areas of creativeness between the digital and the true, reminiscence and forgetting.

The second flooring homes an archive devoted to the Afrofuturist delusion of Drexciya. The archive attracts on DeForrest Brown, Jr.’s thorough analysis on the historical past of techno for his e book Assembling a Black Counter Tradition (2022), which is partly translated into area. At Museion, he arranges quite a few Detroit techno album covers and work by AbuQadim Haqq alongside maps and timelines whereas a narrative in sound unfolds along with his album Techxodus (2023) in addition to his mixes The Fable of Drexciya (2023) and Stereomodernism (2020). Due to the longstanding dialogue between Brown and Haqq and the file assortment of DJ Veloziped / Walter Garber in Bolzano, “HOPE” marks the primary time this beforehand ignored inventive type of historiography and world-building is skilled in a museum to this extent. 

Lastly, following the guiding logic of the wormhole depicted in Haqq’s key visible art work for the exhibition, the bottom flooring creates a passage for lightning-fast journey between distant factors in space-time. The mix of unearthed and simply rising works bridges the histories and futures of Museion as a accumulating establishment and opens an area of listening, speech, and dialogue of “HOPE”’s key questions: The place will we come from and the place will we need to go?

The exhibition consists of items by Almare, Sophia Al-Maria, Ei Arakawa, Trisha Baga, Neïl Beloufa, Black Quantum Futurism, Tony Cokes, Irene Fenara, Michael Fliri, Petrit Halilaj, Matthew Angelo Harrison, AbuQadim Haqq, Andrei Koschmieder, Maggie Lee, Lawrence Lek, Nicola L., Linda Jasmin Mayer, Beatrice Marchi, Bojan Šarčević, Marina Sula, Suzanne Treister, Ilaria Vinci, LuYang, and works from the Museion assortment by Allora & Calzadilla, Shūsaku Arakawa, Ulrike Bernard & Caroline Profanter, Shu Lea Cheang, Tacita Dean, Sonia Leimer, Ana Lupaş, and Riccardo Previdi.

The “HOPE” program additional consists of the Italian premiere of a significant efficiency by choreographer and dancer Trajal Harrell and the Schauspielhaus Zürich ensemble in collaboration with Transart, an off-site exhibition by artist Thomas Feuerstein hosted and supported by NOI Techpark, a number of Museion Artwork Clubevents, and a wealthy mediation program that actively engages the viewers in negotiating “areas of hope.”

at Museion, Bolzano
till February 25, 2024