This future is unthinkable. Yet here we are, thinking it at Damien & The Love Guru

Artists: Rebecca Ackroyd, Simon Brossard & Julie Villard, Carcrash, Botond Keresztesi, Roxanne Maillet, Pakui Hardware, Vanessa da Silva, Anna Solal, Matilda Tjäder

Exhibition title: This future is unthinkable. Yet here we are, thinking it

Curated by: Juliette Desorgues

Venue: Damien & The Love Guru, Brussels, Belgium

Date: January 11 – February 1, 2019

Photography: We Document Art/ all images courtesy of the artists and Damien & The Love Guru, Brussels

Coexisting, we are thinking future coexistence. Predicting it and more: keeping the
unpredictable one open.
Yet such a future, the open future, has become taboo.
Because it is real, yet beyond concept.
Because it is weird.
Art is thought from the future. Thought we cannot explicitly think at present. Thought we may
not think or speak at all.
If we want thought different from the present, then thought must veer towards art.
To be a thing at all – a rock, a lizard, a human – is to be in a twist.
How thought longs to twist and turn like the serpent poetry!
Or is art veering towards thought? Does it arrive? The threads of fate have tied our tongues.
Tongue twisters inclined towards nonsense.
Logic includes nonsense as long as it can tell truth.
The logic of nonsense.
The needle skipped the groove of the present.
Into this dark forest you have already turned.
Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press), p.1-2.

This future, which philosopher Timothy Morton begins to consider, serves as a backdrop for the exhibition presented. A distant future, or past, is imagined, wrought with destruction and decay, ravaged by the effects of anthropocenic capitalism. Like the serpent, this future world playfully twists and loops, biting its own tale. A multitude of beings—human, animal, vegetal, geological or technological—have long co-existed within its dark landscape.

Gradually, with time, the unpredictable occurs. A weird world emerges, inhabited by hybrid beings, sprouting out of the crevasses of the anthropocenic ground. Living both within and yet carefully eschewing the meshes of capitalist detritus, these interstitial creatures have evolved and morphed, guided by an infinite web of emotions.

From convulsing floral composites whose tails offer sexual play to insect-like creatures engaged in digital gaming, they are like tongue twisters of another time; haunting us amidst the chaos of our present world; reminding us to return to the joyful, playful gestures of the everyday.

This future is unthinkable. Yet here we are, thinking it, 2018, exhibition view, Damien & The Love Guru, Brussels

Pakui Hardware, The Return of Sweetness, 2018, Glass objects, heat-treated PVC, textile fabric, latex, sea urchin spikes, silicone, chia seeds, cables, metal clamps, Dimensions variable