Memories of the Future

The title of the exhibition contains a kind of appeal, referring to the formation of future memories in the unbroken chain of past, present, and future. Practically everything surrounding us has a past, and it is far from always being orderly and is entangled with contradictory narratives. But if the science of history is studying the past and systematically relates it to us, art has the "right" to create it through interpretations and reflections. Throughout its existence, art has served more than anything else as a historical resource, and artifacts are too often taken as documents. Outside of science, we draw on a wide variety of art data scattered across the field of the past, finding in them a reflection of the present, and we assemble a narrative that suits us, to which science may or may not have any relation.  

As early as the 1960s, Hannah Arendt warned that the past, without critical dialogue with the present, could prove to be a problematic resource for building the future. And now, in their article "Why Compare the Present to the Past?" in the Foreign Policy Magazine (June 30, 2025), Ivan Krastev and Leonard Benardo note that recently, "In the current geopolitical reality, visions of the future have been replaced by analogies from the past. Thinking through historical analogies has become the preferred way of dealing with the anxieties of the present." 

The works in the exhibition, some of which already have their own history, are a kind of reaction to these disturbing milestones. While the political present canonizes the past in a spiral, leaving the future somehow beyond view, unclear, unpredictable, and unexpected, artists naturally fill the pause. They take responsibility and create ironic, metaphorical, allegorical testimonies of our present, when it becomes the past.