Writing the History of the Future

The collection of the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe as a guest of the Gwangju Museum of Art.

In the exhibition »Writing the History of the Future. Signature Works of the Singular ZKM Media Art Collection« at the Gwangju Museum of Art in Gwangju, Korea, the ZKM presents key works from its media art collection, which is one of the largest of its kind in the world.

The presentation of the works is based on a media-historical model: instead of a history of styles, the development of art since the 1960s is told on the basis of the changes in technical media and the associated aesthetic and social changes. The exhibition brings together around 90 works in six sections that reveal the transformation of the genre of portraiture, the representation of the body, landscape, and architecture, as well as the change in our conception of human and machine creativity: through works of graphic art and photography, film and video, with interactive computer-based installations, to digital works created with the aid of artificial intelligence techniques.

The title of the exhibition »Writing the History of the Future« reminds us that time and again, artists have anticipated aesthetic, media, and social practices – that artists write the history of the future.

From February 23, 2019, to January 9, 2022, »Writing the History of the Future« was exhibited for the first time at the ZKM, based on a concept by Peter Weibel and Margit Rosen. The adapted exhibition »Writing the History of the Future. Signature Works of the Singular ZKM Media Art Collection« in Gwangju is jointly produced by the GMA and the ZKM within the framework of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in the field of media art.

Artists

Marina Abramović, Refik Anadol, John Baldessari, Otto  Beckmann, Oskar Beckmann, Dara Birnbaum, Erick Calderon, Peter Campus, Rafael Cardenas, Frédéric Chaubin, Douglas Davis, Jake Elwes, Harun Farocki, Gerard Ferrandez, Kit Fitzgerald, Kiyoshi  Furukawa, Walter Giers, John J. Godfrey, Shilpa Gupta, Daniel Heiss, Gottfried Helnwein, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Gary Hill, Candida Höfer, Jenny Holzer, Nan Hoover, Joan Jonas, Hiroshi Kawano, Dieter Kiessling, Edmund Kuppel, Bernd Lintermann, Laurent Mignonneau, Tracey Moffat, Manfred Mohr, Vera Molnár, Wolfgang Münch, Frieder Nake, Bruce Nauman, Michael A. Noll, Tony Oursler, Nam June Paik, Mario von Rickenbach, Pipilotti Rist, Ulrike Rosenbach, Thomas Ruff, Zbigniew Rybczyński, John Sanborn, Ira Schneider, Richard Serra, Carlota Fay Schoolman, Jeffrey Shaw, Christa Sommerer, Steina, Thomas Struth, Aldo Tambellini, Ulay, Frederik Vanhoutte, Woody Vasulka, Bill Viola, Wolf Vostell, Tamás Waliczky, Peter Weibel, Erwin Wurm, and Jud Yalkut.