Writing the History of the Future

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 presented key works from its media art collection, which is one of the largest of its kind in the world.

The presentation of the works was 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 brought 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.

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.