November 05 - April 10, 2022
Les portes du possible, Art & Science-fiction
Type
Exposition de groupe
Exhibition curator
Alexandra Müller
Exhibition views
List of works
Press release
“Science fiction is the art of the possible,” said Ray Bradbury. Under the guise of foresight, it speaks to us about the present; it is a laboratory of hypotheses that manipulate and extrapolate the repressive norms and dogmas of today's world, its ambitions, its social ills, its opportunities and its perils.
The last few decades have seen the advent of a “liquid” form of the present that disintegrates our beliefs and habits, accelerates discoveries as well as their obsolescence. In this unstable context, many artists are inspired by the world of science fiction to conduct critical thinking. More finely and profoundly than other genres, it can question human potentials by overcoming the divisions between science, ethics and politics in order to take an “external” look at humanity and its inventions.
By developing the possibilities of the present, by developing stories based on scientific hypotheses or by designing unprecedented lifestyles and realities, science fiction is a genre that puts humans in the face of radical alterity. It proposes an emancipation from dominant political discourses, it embodies difference, political utopia, the profound renewal of our perception. As a result, it has always been a breeding ground for protest movements.
Speculative fiction irritates us, makes us progress by frightening us, and shakes the ramparts of our habits and those of our conscience. Although she acts from the margins, the themes she addresses are at the heart of current societal issues that concern us all: social fragmentation, ultra-capitalism, new forms of panoptism and totalitarianism, alienation, trans-/post-humanism, trans-/post-humanism, the removal of gender boundaries, colonialism or, of course, ecological disaster and the obsolescence of Man. However, since the historic Science-Fiction exhibition that Harald Szeemann organized in 1967/68 at the Kunsthalle in Berne, the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris and the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf, a time when SF was on the rise, therefore, a time when SF was on the rise, few major projects were dedicated to his fruitful marriage with art.
Bringing together around 180 works from the end of the 1960s to the present day, the exhibition Les Portes du Possible. On 2,300 m2 of space, Art & Science Fiction will work with visual artists and writers, as well as architects and filmmakers, to search for capillarities between imagined worlds and reality.
In the mode of self-fulfilling prophecies, science fiction continues to shape our vision of the future and contributes to its construction. Changing the imaginary and semantics also means influencing the trajectory of societies.
The exhibition, by not focusing on the dominant dystopian prism, will strive to work in the direction of revitalization and voluntary reappropriation of the future.