VideogalleryAfter Us

Identity and alienation, nostalgia and memory, populism and truth: a poetic but acute diagnosis of the present suggests a pessimistic perspective on the future, in an After Us era.

Life on earth is changing at a breathtaking speed, with ambivalent consequences: expanding access to a globalised market has facilitated the middle class’s growth in former Third World countries and enabled a growing number of human beings to escape poverty. On the other hand, globalisation and turbo-capitalism are accompanied by a widening gap between rich and poor, resulting in civil wars and mass migration. Digital technologies and social media offer better access to communication and education to those who were previously isolated and created new phenomena such as hatred and the spread of fake news.

Artists have perceived these disturbing developments for a long time. Sometimes, they look from a present-day perspective, and an imagined distant future at the Anthropocene, or the Capitalocene. The scope and speed of environmental change increase originally from the concept of capital and a concept of growth that excludes most humans and reduces most humans to mere consumers’ role.

The works have been selected from the collection of Beatrice Bulgari’s Fondazione In Between Art Film archive and show a poetic but acute diagnosis of the present, suggesting a melancholic perspective on the future in an era ‘after us’. The artists in this selection of video works focus on the problems and phenomena of our time such as migration, loss and displacement; identity and alienation; nostalgia and memory; control and surveillance; populism, truth and manipulation.

header: Adelita Husni-Bey, The Reading/La Seduta, 2017.