Based in the heart of Amsterdam, the FUTURES Foundation organises and curates a year-round exhibition programme. The programme includes a series of exhibitions and screenings, featuring both selected artists from the residency programme, artists shown on the FUTURES platform and other high-profile artists. By offering a continuous stream of high-quality exhibitions, FUTURES aims to focus on artists who present an avant-garde perspective.
Underlying these exhibitions is the core principle of the FUTURES foundation, which emphasises diversity, inclusivity and experimentation in contemporary photography. The exhibitions embody these principles by highlighting the plurality of cultures and the unique visions of artists.
A strong sense of responsibility and a desire to promote positive change underpin the foundation's daily activities. FUTURES aims to raise awareness of its surroundings and the world at large. The belief that culture is essential for progress serves as a guiding principle and drives the foundation's dedication to transforming itself and the world through art.
FUTURES anthology presents a series of digital screenings of our thematic exhibitions.
Starting with the RESET exhibition the foundation wants to focus on the complex relationship between us and our surroundings. Over the last few years we have become enmeshed within massive technological infrastructures that no single individual could hope to comprehend. And now there is a sense in which reactionary social, economic and political movements are directing the flow of events and threatening the very basis of the freedoms that underpin our communities. From a species perspective, environmental events require us to reconsider our position as human beings in the wider world, or ‘the critical zone’ as Bruno Latour describes the thin space for survival that we now inhabit. From political tensions to to the environmental disasters and Social revolutions Our innate need for a sense of security is constantly challenged and we experience a collective fragility. In other words, many older predictive processes no longer apply because the conditions of change have themselves changed.
This takes the connotation of a reset which is leading human beings to re-think the basis of their positions in the world through a process able to place creativity and free-thinking as cornerstones to foster pragmatic processes.
RESET features the work of seven artists who, in- and within their differentiated and multi-layered practices, offer plural methods and visions to address some key issues and stories concerning modernity.They are: Ana Zibelnik, Eva O'Leary, Sanne De Wilde, Garry Loughlin, Dávid Biró, Ela Polkowska, Julie Poly.
The show, curated by Marina Paulenka (Founder and former Artistic Director of Organ Vida and former Artistic Director of Unseen) involved the following artists: Maija Savolainen, Hien Hoang, Emily Graham, Carlos Alba, Eva Kreuger, Marta Bogdanska, Alexey Shlyk (in collaboration with Ben Van den Berghe), Valeria Cherchi, Io Sivertsen (in collaboration with Ylva Gulpinar, Christa Barlinn Korvald and Signe Rosenlund-Hauglid), Lena Dobrowolska & Teo Ormond-Skeaping
Waves of counter-narratives continue to bloom and subvert our knowledge base, flooding the frameworks that once navigated our senses of being and belonging. Driven by the fusion of the physical and virtual realms, Europe now watches as a young generation of makers attempts to foster a new cultural literacy; searching, breaking, and reworking their mediums and conceptual moulds.
But can we define a direction in all this disorder? Within this climate of hybrid experimentation, we are witnessing the forging of new realities every day. What new forms of making, narrating and reading are here to stay, and what can we just make out on the horizon ahead?
On the Verge showcase the projects featured by Cian Burke, Mark Duffy, Pauline Hisbacq, Julia Klewaniec, Alice Pallot, Daniel Szalai and Ugo Woatzi tell personal and collective stories concerning conflicts, struggles for gender equality, food and ecological sustainability, and the rise of populism and nationalism throughout Europe. At the same time, from an aesthetic point of view and in terms of photographic languages, these works represent the most innovative and relevant experiences in the current European photography panorama.
ENERGY: redistributing power and taming consumption, aims to explore, on one hand, the ecological, socio-political, economic, and humanitarian energy crises that humanity and non-human entities are facing today. On the other hand, Energy is paradoxically seen as the power needed to bring change into this world. It serves as the catalyst for vitality, in terms of vitality, creativity, strength, and consolidation, brings people together, makes them socially active, helps each other, and enables them to react to ecological and socio-political emergencies. Lastly, the annual theme focuses on practices that reflect on the medium of photography, its specificity, and its circulation in relation to energy.
The selected artists are Antonio Guerra (ES), David Biro (HU), Hien Hoang (VE/DE), Marta Pinto Machado (CV/PT), Tanja Engelberts (NL), Umberto Diecinove (IT), Yana Kononova (UA) and Yana Wernicke (DE). Each artist presented unique and diverse perspectives on the theme of ENERGY, their projects will be shown at Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center (Budapest),PhotoIreland (Dublin), and FOTODOK (Utrecht).
Next exhibitions scheduled in September 2023, in the new FUTURES hub.
More info will follow
More info will follow
