calendario eventi  :: 

X

20/2/2001

Emma Kay

Chisenhale Gallery, London

Future.

Chisenhale presents a major new commission by British artist Emma Kay. "Future" is an installation comprising a digitally animated text work which attempts to describe the future of the world.

"Future" is generated from Kay's research into the collective domains of science, culture, spirituality and economics. A text-based mapping of the future, the work is a trajectory envisaged for every cultural sphere. From cinema and current affairs to science fiction and advertising, any realm that describes an idea of the future is co-opted into Kay's vision. Combining fact and fiction, "Future" becomes a diagrammatic classification of collective expectations. "Future" is inevitably incomplete, wholly subjective and inaccurate, yet it is convincing through its authority and conviction.

Kay's recent work has dealt with individual memory in a range of media and across a divergence of major subjects: "The World From Memory" was a series of hand drawn maps, whilst "The Bible From Memory" was realised as a 7,000 word text. "Shakespeare From Memory" attempted the reconstruction of each of the writer's plays and "Worldview", an 80,000-word text piece, was also published in book form.

Kay's Chisenhale project expands this accomplished body of work by incorporating the realm of the future into her practice for the first time. Future's use of time-based media is further evidence of new directions in Kay's work. As an installation, "Future" consists of projections and monitors displaying text and diagrams. However, like much of Kay's recent work, "Future" draws on the legacy and ambition of minimalism. Taking on a subject of vast scope and manifesting it with relatively humble means, "Future" is an impossible vision of unknowable and unchartered terrain. "Future", however, operates in a contemporary context by focusing on notions of collective memory, information overload and the spectre of failed modernity.

"Future" is inevitably flawed - materially and factually - but Kay is interested in a set of unqualified proposals which unfold before the viewer, rather than a fixed, predetermined vision. Kay has spoken of the internet as structural parallel to this work. Like the net and the future, "Future" is a non-linear narrative, and has no apparent endpoint.

Emma Kay has recently been included in a number of group exhibitions: "Hard Candy", Galerie Wieland, Berlin; "Songs Sung by Men From the Point of View of Women", Platform, London; "6th Istanbul Biennale"; "Abracadbara", Tate Gallery, London; 'On The Edge of the Western World', Yerba Buena Centre, San Francisco; "Orbis Terranium", Plantin Moretus Museum; "British Art Show 5", touring to Edinburgh, Southampton, Cardiff, Birmingham; "Devotie", W139, Amsterdam; "Limitless", Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna and "Self Portrait", Mercer Union Centre, New York. Kay had a solo exhibition at The Approach, London in 1998.

For more information, images or interviews please contact Stuart Croft, Press Officer or Tamsin Dillon, Acting Director on 020 8981 4518 or email: mail@chisenhale.org.uk

Gallery hours - Wed-Sun - 1pm-6pm

Chisenhale Gallery - 64 Chisenhale Road - London, E3 5QZ - Tel. 020 8981 4518 - Fax. 020 8980 7169

stampa

permanent link