Angel among the Ruins

• Images
• Text

Part from text about the exhibition
(Site Specific Project)

All video art works of video art are linked to the past, to the history of the Western world, to the construction of memory and of national identity, wherein destruction is linked to a political stance. In a certain sense history can be said to manufacture its own archaeology layer upon layer, and civilization is thus an accumulation of the destructions of past periods. On the other side of the time continuum is the future: somehow, ruins and destruction always feature heavily in works dealing with the divinations of the future in film, the visual arts and literature. The ruins of an old world act as the bedrock of a new, fictional one. Viewing the works grouped in this show gives rise to the question, are we even able to imagine a future without ruins. Perhaps, in the future, ruins play a role as central as in the present in the fashioning of our self-image.

All of the works suggested take place in the present – in the here-and-now. The ruins featured in them are taken from different places, usually places reported on in the news media. Through the artistic treatment, however, they are understood differently. Ten artists from different places,ten video pieces dealing with ruins in the here-and-now.