September 30, 2023 – February 25, 2024
HOPE
Curated by Bart van der Heide and Leonie Radine in collaboration with DeForrest Brown, Jr.
Opening: 29.09.2023, 7 pm
HOPE marks the third chapter of TECHNO HUMANITIES with an international research group consisting of Bart van der Heide, Leonie Radine, DeForrest Brown, Jr., and Museion Passage Group
Exhibition design by Diogo Passarinho Studio
Ever since opening its doors exactly 15 years ago, the Museion building has been repeatedly described as alien, a UFO that landed in the center of Bolzano. HOPE endorses the view of the museum as a spaceship, a time capsule, a portal to another dimension. The exhibition will transform Museion into a production site of wonder, merging science and fiction to evoke hope through individual and collective imaginations of futures and pasts. As Philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote in the introduction of his Principle of Hope (1954): “We need the most powerful telescope, that of polished utopian consciousness,” to penetrate the darkness.
HOPE invites visitors to move between real and imagined spaces and times to try on alternative viewpoints. The exhibition architecture suggests an upside-down, non-linear path through the building, leading first to the fourth floor, which showcases various artistic time capsules in an observatory-like setting. By proceeding through individual and collective artistic cosmologies, the self and the other are open for exploration beyond a humancentric worldview. Here, the selection of artworks creates a sci-fi atmosphere between apocalyptic scenarios and new beginnings at the intersection of the humanities, technology, ecology, and economy.
Artists exhibiting on the third floor interrogate new tools and challenges in the era of artificial intelligence and other forms of digital worldbuilding. Their arcade-like installations create immersive spaces of imagination between the virtual and the real, memory and forgetting.
The second floor houses an archive dedicated to the Afrofuturist myth of Drexciya. The archive draws on DeForrest Brown, Jr.’s thorough research on the history of techno for his book Assembling a Black Counter Culture (2022), which is partly translated into space. At Museion, he arranges numerous Detroit techno album covers and paintings by AbuQadim Haqq alongside maps and timelines while a story in sound unfolds with his album Techxodus (2023) as well as his mixes The Myth of Drexciya (2023) and Stereomodernism (2020). Thanks to the longstanding dialogue between Brown and Haqq and the record collection of DJ Veloziped / Walter Garber in Bolzano, HOPE marks the first time this previously overlooked artistic form of historiography and world-building is experienced in a museum to this extent.
Finally, following the guiding logic of the wormhole depicted in Haqq’s key visual artwork for the exhibition, the ground floor creates a passage for lightning-fast travel between distant points in space-time. The combination of unearthed and just emerging works bridges the histories and futures of Museion as a collecting institution and opens a space of listening, speech, and discussion of HOPE‘s key questions: Where do we come from and where do we want to go?
The exhibition includes pieces 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 collection by Allora & Calzadilla, Shūsaku Arakawa, Ulrike Bernard & Caroline Profanter, Shu Lea Cheang, Tacita Dean, Sonia Leimer, Ana Lupaş, and Riccardo Previdi.
The HOPE program further includes the Italian premiere of a major performance 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, several Museion Art Club events, and a rich mediation program that actively engages the audience in negotiating “spaces of hope”.
Accompanying program
Pre-Opening events:
- 27.09.2023, 6.00 pm: Conversation between choreographer Trajal Harrell and curator Leonie Radine, in collaboration with Transart, at OASIE Transart (Ex Enel), via Dante 32, Bolzano.
- 28.09.2023, 8.30 pm: Trajal Harrell: Monkey off My Back or the Cat’s Meow, performance in collaboration with Transart at FieraMesse BolzanoBozen
Prior to the opening of HOPE, Museion and Transart will collectively present performance of Monkey off My Back or The Cat’s Meow. In this 2021 piece, Trajal Harrell’s most opulent to date, 17 dancers and actors from the Schauspielhaus Zürich Dance Ensemble celebrate togetherness and the power of collectivity. Inspired by political gatherings as ecstatic moments where people share their beliefs and imaginations of the not-yet, it is a contagious, empowering, and moving manifestation of hope and happiness as active emotions that arise from darkness.
Opening:
- 29.09.2023, 7.00 pm: inauguration of the exhibition
- 29.09.2023, 8.00 pm – 00.00 am: Museion Art Club OCCUPY music event with DJ-set in the underground floor, with the participation of Bassiani Club, an underground techno club of Tblisi, Georgia.
Further events:
- 06.10.2023, 11.00 am: Opening of Thomas Feuerstein, METABOLICA (Moby Dick), at the crane hall of NOI Techpark, in collaboration with NOI
From October 6 until November 12, 2023, Museion will collaborate on an exhibition by artist Thomas Feuerstein in the big crane hall of NOI Techpark in Bolzano. Based on the chemical and biological interactions of bacteria, Feuerstein’s extensive installation METABOLICA (Moby Dick) creates a factory-like metabolism. His explorations of new regenerative practices at the intersections of art and science correspond with the innovative research of energy systems, sustainable buildings, and water technologies at NOI as South Tyrol’s growing innovation district.
- 06.10.23 Long Night of Museums in Bolzano with a music event with DJ Veloziped / Walter Garber and more at Museion.
- 09, 16, 24.11.2023: Museion Art Club presents the project Longing for Belonging, a series of events and performances taking place in the “parasitic” architectural space conceived by the collective Parasite 2.0. The different formats that articulate the project intend to investigate what it means today to belong to something – to a body, to a place or to a community.
The page will be updated periodically with all new side events.
