“Science fiction is the subversive agent of doubt […] Under the guise of anticipation, it sheds light on current societal and scientific developments and trends, holds out the hope of a world re-enchanted by the power of our imagination and makes us dream of transforming utopia into reality.”1
From the series " Water Life Series »
Giclée print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Bright White, 80 × 80 cm
Commissioned by WaterAid with support from the H&M Foundation
Courtesy of the artist and WaterAid
Copyright: © Aïda Muluneh. Used with permission. Commissioned by Water Aid
Photographic print, 90,7 x 108,7 cm
Paris, Centre Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art
Copyright: © Sandy Skoglund
From Sandy Skoglund's fluorescent green Radioactive Cats to Tishan HSU's sleeping man in an electrolytic turquoise bath (Breath 4, 2021), via Castellanos & Valverde's human-plant “symbiotic interactions,” the Center Pompidou-Metz invites us to open the Gates of Possibility through more than two hundred works testing to the growing attraction exerted by science fiction on the visual arts from the end of the 1950s to today.
A highly subversive but above all forward-looking exhibition, counterbalancing the dystopias dear to the genre with the transhumanist or ecological utopias of the more recent trends of biopunk or solarpunk, envisaging SF as a tool for emancipation and reconnection with the living rather than as an escape – into space or cyberspace.
Pigment inkjet print on Canson Infinity Platine Fibre Rag 310gsm paper, 100 x 150 cm
Edition of 5 + 2 Artist's Proofs
Paris, Magnin-A Gallery
Copyright: © Adagp, Paris, 2022 / Courtesy Galerie MAGNIN-A, Paris
Thus, if Fabrice Monteiro in his Prophecy series makes a giant witch with the appearance of an Erinye emerge from a mountain of detritus, mortifying against black smoke, Max Hooper Schneider with his Estuary Holobiant enthrones a “machinic supra-organism,” a post-apocalyptic “cohort of micro-organisms” attesting to the power of the living and appearing like a promise of resurrection; while the duo Castellanos & Valverde, with their wearable plant vibration sensors,2 revisiting the “man-machine” – to “conceive a new type of interface between the human body and plants” – gives us a glimpse of a possible regeneration. From there to promising “the best of all possible worlds”… We must cultivate our guardn, [1] replies Candide to Pangloss, who is delighted with the happy outcome of their mad wanderings at the end of Voltaire's philosophical tale. Let's take a leaf out of their book and open The Gates of Possibility…
1 Laurent Lebon and Chiara Parisi (respectively president and director of the Center Pompidou-Metz) in the preface to the catalog.
2 Symbiotic-Interaction (Wearable), 2016-2017
THE DOORS OF THE POSSIBLE Art & Science fiction
Centre Pompidou-Metz, 57000 Metz
Until April 10th
Stéphanie Dulout