Stephen Riolo

As published on V Magazine

Back to the Future
curated by Carson Chan
The Center for Opinions in Music and Art in Berlin

With the present moment barely ever escaping the lens of a camera or the text of a tweet, we have seen the passing years of our lives recorded into the new form of an “ever-present” indexed and googleable chronology. This information reality, freed from the persistence of time and decay, has become a limitless collection of our contemporary history, while producing an extreme sense of temporal relativity. Though our understanding of this new chonological form of our information age is infantile at best, the time has come to address its first anomalies; their implications for culture and art. Back to the Future, curated by Carson Chan at The Center for Opinions in Music and Art in Berlin, presented just such a selection of contemporary art, focused on the swiftly shifting essence of time. The iridescent metal lozenge of Paolo Chiasera’s “Archivio Zarathustra” (2009), a vessel containing the ashes of the entitled archive was very much in line with his recent virtuosic presentation of luxurious metal sculpture at the MARTA Herford. A slippery stream of conscious, “Versions” (2009) by Oliver Laric, led visitors though a rather graphic analysis of user generated media content and its rising position in socio-political critique. Marooned in the idyllic landscapes of classical etching, the ghostly high rises of Cyprien Gaillard’s “Belief in The Age of Disbelief” (2005), appear as silent warnings against any dream of time travel back to the unraveled utopias of modernity. With the striking appearance of satellite imagery, Warren Neidich’s, tin-type photographs of civil war re-enactments set themselves in a well executed conundrum; their false historical content, in opposition to their true historic medium and purely contemporary (aerial) perspective.

Paolo Chiasera (Image courtesy ArtSlant)

Ignacio Uriarte (Image courtesy COMA Berlin)

Olivier Laric (Image courtesy COMA Belin)