Artist: Karlos Gil
Exhibition title: Timefall
Venue: 1646, The Hague, The Netherlands
Date: November 11 – December 18, 2022
Photography: Jhoeko / Maarten Nauw / images copyright and courtesy of the artist and 1646, The Hague
Picturing a future in times of environmental disasters
The Hague art space 1646 is showing new work by internationally renowned artist and filmmaker Karlos Gil. Through cinema, science fiction and apocalyptic landscapes, the viewer is invited to speculate about our joint future.
With his first solo exhibition in The Netherlands titled Timefall, Karlos Gil turns the space of 1646 into a cave. The cave is the domain of gods and monsters; of birth and burial, where extraordinary events come to pass. Dark, dangerous and detached from time: caves are places of visions and experiences both sacred and profane. More recently, they have become home to data farms, seed vaults, communication cables and doomsday bunkers.
Combining technologies from different times
Timefall touches on an in-between zone, detached from the conventions of time, where references in the artist’s work help us reflect on the past and foretell the future. His tapestries, for example, show the visual representations of the sound frequencies of fantastic animals (a mermaid, cyclops, centaur, sphinx, etc.). The tapestries were made using a Jacquard loom, a weaving technique from the nineteenth century and one of the first tools to function with perforated cards. These perforated cards came out to be the precursor for 1950’s computer programme punch cards, eventually making for the development of the personal computer. Reappropriating past and present industrial production methods in combination with fictional elements, Gil crafts imagery for possible futures.
Shaping our future with sci-fi and cinema
Through the deep depths of a lost civilization, where apocalyptic landscapes frame the stage for a species that has evolved from our environmentally challenged reality, ‘Timefall’ invites us to be aware of the power and potential that science fiction and cinema have. An awareness of how these influence our perception of the past and how we imagine the future, enables us to take agency for worlds to come.
About Karlos Gil
Through painting, sculpture, and installation, Karlos Gil (b. 1984, Talavera ES), addresses the fundamental questions about what it means to be human in today’s world. His latest projects reflect on the relationship between technological development and the principles of the natural world, blurring the borderline between the organic and the artificial, the natural and the industrial. Karlos Gil studied at the School of Visuals Arts in New York and at the faculties of Fine Arts in Lisbon and Madrid where he earned his PhD in 2016. He has had numerous international exhibitions at such venues as Centre Pompidou, Paris; HKW, Berlin; Witte de With, Rotterdam; NTU CCA, Singapore, Gasworks, London; Fondazione Baruchello, Rome; CRAC–Montbeliard; Galeria Luisa Strina, Sao Paulo; MARCO, Vigo; CA2M, Madrid. He has participated in III Moscow International Biennale (2012) and Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria) in 2020.
