Speculative Futurism: Inversting the Archive

VOX-POP is proud to present Speculative Futurism: Inverting the Archive, featuring work by Ida Fisker, Unfinished, Dilek Yördem and Başar Kurnaz, Celine Micheli, and Smaragda Nitsopoulou.

Art can help people imagine futures before they materialise. To spark your imagination, the VOX-POP student committee has curated a collection of speculative future narratives. Together they form an archive of the future. As an institution, the archive represents a powerful narrative of seeming objectivity and universality, while it underrepresents historically marginalised narratives. Unlike other archives, this exhibition explores the future, not the past. Dominant future narratives are as devoid of alternative futures as archives are of alternative pasts. The Speculative Futurism exhibition aims to fill such voids in our future imaginations through speculative storytelling. Saidiya Hartman first came up with the term critical fabulation. With this imaginative form of storytelling, she created alternative narratives that challenge the dominant historical viewpoints found in archives. Following Hartman, Donna Haraway applied this method to the future and coined speculative fabulation. This method of radical speculation imagines new possibilities for the future while remaining critical of the present.

We invited six emerging artists to leave the dominant narratives of the future for what they are and to fill the voids through their critical imagination. Can you imagine a future radically outside of the boundaries of the present?

The exhibition will open on June 1st at 19.30.

About the artists

Celine Micheli (they/them, IT) is a transdisciplinary queer non-binary artist working in the fields of performance, sound and visual arts. They are originally from Italy and currently studying Fine Art at AKI ArtEZ in the Netherlands. Celine addresses themes of intersectional feminism, vulnerability and intimacy through speculative fabulation. Through their work, they explore experimental and future-oriented scenarios and change-of-state in systems of political and ecological discourses. They create non-linear narratives in the form of written, vocal and performative practices of nourishing understandings of the human body in relation to the non-human world.

Smaragda Nitsopoulou (she/her, GR) is a video artist, film director and editor from Greece. Through her practice, she explores themes of memory and death in the Anthropocene era. She aims to evoke the ecumenical experience of death among the living, by using found footage in her interactive pieces. She has participated in several international festivals and art fairs such as Documenta 14, Slavonian Biennale,  Video Art Miden & Simultan. In 2021, she completed her first feature-length documentary "Death Under Control''. She is a 2018 fellow of the SNF Artist Fellowship program and a 2020 resident of the IMPROVISA-LIFE IN MOTION artistic residency that took place in 2021 & 2022 in Athens, Lublin and Ljubljana.

Art initiative +entia approaches a world without words. ‘Re-Existence’ is a collaboration of Dilek Yördem and Başar Kurnaz, as part of +entia.

Dilek Yördem (she/her, TR) is a lecturer and designer at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. She is also an illustrator and works with publishing houses in Turkey, such as Yapı Kredi Culture Arts and Publishing. She exhibited her work at Pera Museum, London Illustration Fair, and The Island Bristol. Under the name “+entia”, she researches the interactions of paper and physical effects such as light.

Başar Kurnaz (he/him, TR) graduated from the Visual Communication Design Department at Izmir University of Economics in 2012. He started his coincidental, personal works in his university years. Besides paintings, the artist is also focused on digital art, typography, audio-visual works, and illustration. He published his work in magazines in Turkey and joined composite exhibitions.

Ida Fisker (she/her, DK) works with tactility, repetitive making and the mundane magic of unseen labour. This feeds her practice of witchcraft and fem and non-binary storytelling across time. Making is a power move, even when the power is soft and slow. Her works are a way for her to draw upon her two main muses/energies called “The Strange” and “The Known”. They manifest physically and spiritually in her work and are the foundation of what she researches and creates.

About the student committee

Every year a group of talented students is selected to gain work experience at VOX-POP as cultural programme makers. They learn how to curate cultural programmes, from editing to production. This exhibition is also a festive closing of their programme year.