About the Exhibition.

Histories of a Vanishing Present is a long-term initiative conceived as a flexible structure to produce projects invested in generating original scholarship. Imagining the exhibition as a temporal form that is shaped over time and across a multiplicity of spatialities, including but not limited to thematic shows, new commissions, events, situations, and publications, Histories of a Vanishing Present intends to transform the usually insular process of academic research into a forum for public scholarship where critical inquiry happens in direct dialogue with audiences. 

This curatorial endeavor is committed to a generation of artists rooted in the Global South who were born and came of age after 1980. Through the lens of postmemory, this project mines the Millennial Generation’s complex relationship to nationalism, cultural heritage, historical trauma, and identity politics. At the core of our investigation is an interest in understanding how formative historical moments have come to define an emerging generation of practitioners that did not experience them directly yet nevertheless has been deeply affected by memories inherited from those who did through images, stories, places, and actions. From independence movements in Africa, to military dictatorships in Latin America, to the transformation of the Middle East after WWII, to armed conflict and Western intervention in East Asia, to the formation of a post-Soviet Eastern Europe, Histories of a Vanishing Present navigates the consequences of violent pasts and their influence on the work and practices of those shaping the future of contemporary art. 

A Prologue is the first exhibition of this multi-year project. Organized as four rotating chapters of varying lengths, A Prologue introduces a constellation of artists, voices, positions, and geographies that will anchor the questions and inquiries guiding this initiative over the next three years. Two central themes structure this introductory show—history as struggle and history as material for reinvention and recreation. These two distinct approaches to engage with the past are revealed through the practices of ten artists living and working around the globe. Mobilizing film and moving images these artists highlight the intricacies of trans-generational acts of transfer and the textured realities forging current sociopolitical, cultural,  and economic climates in regions often positioned at the periphery of art history’s canon. Participating artists in each chapter of this show will be announced as the preceding chapter closes and in conjunction with accompanying public conversations that will contextualize the works presented. Many of the works featured in this exhibition are being shown in Los Angeles for the very first time. 

Exhibition Schedule

Chapter 1: Jan. 9 - 23

Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme: Collapse

Collapse (2009) brings together imaginary and actual moments of resistance and loss in an act of excavation that illuminates the deep disruptions that have shaped not only Palestinian lived experience and memory,  but also shared histories of struggle. The sampled footage includes sequences from The Open Door (1963), The Battleship Potemkin (1925), and In Search of Palestine—Edward Said’s Return Home (1998).

A literal and poetic displacement resonates throughout the work, in part a meditation on a contemporary Palestinian landscape ruptured by a breakdown of community, memory, and narrative. Moments of recurrent potential and failure of resistance are repeated to critically reconstruct past fragments and uncover the suspension of the future in the present. This feeling of continual suspension and relapse, progress and deadly repetition, is played out, exploring the overlap between personal trajectories and multiple historical narratives.  It is in the ambiguities between absence and presence, nostalgia and an altogether frustrating sense of deja-vu, that the installation explores an anxious and obsessive state of being, trapped in the transition between past, present, reality and fiction.

Collapse was produced with the support of the Delfina Foundation. 

Jumana Manna & Sille Storihle: The Goodness Regime 

 The Goodness Regime (2013) is a film written and directed collaboratively by artists Jumana Manna and Sille Storihle. With the help of a cast of children, the film investigates the foundations of the ideology and self-image of modern Norway—from the Crusades, via the adventures of Fritjof Nansen and the trauma of wartime occupation, to the diplomatic theater of the Oslo Peace Accords. The Goodness Regime was shot in Norway and Palestine, and combines children’s performances with archive sound recordings (including US President Bill Clinton speaking at the signing of the Oslo Accords, and Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik’s New Year address to the Norwegian people in 2000) and new documentary footage filmed on location. In the course of their research, Manna and Storihle interviewed Ron Pundak, one of the Israeli architects of the Oslo back-channel talks, and Hanan Ashrawi, the former Palestine Liberation Organization spokeswoman. The film premiered at the Kunsthall Oslo exactly twenty years after the conclusion and signing of the Oslo Agreement by Israel and the PLO in August-September 1993. 

Chapter 2: Jan. 27 – Feb. 20

Larry Achiampong & David Blandy: Finding Fanon Part Two 

Finding Fanon Part Two (2015), part of The Finding Fanon trilogy by UK based artists Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, is inspired by the lost plays of Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), a politically radical humanist whose practice dealt with the psychopathology of colonization and the social and cultural consequences of decolonization. Throughout the series, Achiampong and Blandy negotiate Fanon’s ideas, examining the politics of race, racism and decolonization, and how these societal issues affect our relationship amidst an age of new technology, popular culture, and globalization. For Finding Fanon Part Two, Achiampong and Blandy collide art-house cinema with digital culture’s Machinima, resulting in a work that explores the post-colonial condition from inside a simulated environment—the Grand Theft Auto 5 in-game video editor. The video work combines several stories, including how the artists’ familial histories relate to colonial history, an examination of how their relationship is formed through the virtual space, and thoughts on the implications of the post-human condition. 

 Finding Fanon Part Two was originally commissioned by Brighton Digital Festival and produced by Artsadmin. 

Aleksandra Domanović: Turbo Sculpture 

Turbo Sculpture (2010-2013) investigates how image culture and information flows have contributed to the postwar cultural environment of the former Yugoslavia. Consisting of a digital slide show and audio narration, Turbo Sculpture traces the emergence of a new kind of public art in the ex-Yugoslavia republics wherein local authorities in a bid to provide new points of identification for their communities chose to erect bronze monuments of western pop cultural heroes—such as Johnny Depp and Sylvester Stalone’s ‘Rocky Balboa’—rather than immortalize their own political leaders following a tumultuous period of war and violence in the region. In this work Domanović powerfully reveals the ways in which these statues memorializing popular commodities reflect the region’s own emergence within capitalist markets and how this rejection of the themes and figures typically associated with public monuments constitutes a denial of history through radical transformations of iconographic traditions. By looking at the efforts of a region that does not want to bear witness to its past, Turbo Sculpture’s anti-monuments highlight how history itself can become material for reinvention.

Maria Taniguchi: Untitled (Celestial Motors)

Untitled (Celestial Motors) (2012) is a visual meditation on an icon of modern urban Philippine life—the jeepney. This ubiquitous form of public transportation, originally built from U.S. military jeeps left on the islands after World War II, is normally exuberantly painted and personalized. Taniguchi's formal video portrait instead focuses on a gleaming stainless steel example, fresh from the Celestial Motors factory. Nearly static, abstracted details of the jeepney are intercut with deliberate pans across its body; it is silent and slow—two words one would never use to describe a jeepney in use—allowing this postcolonial object to resonate fully.

Celestial Motors was commissioned by the LUX Associate Artists Programme. 

Kemang Wa Lehulere: A Homeless Song (Sleep is for the Gifted) 

A Homeless Song (Sleep is for the Gifted) is an imaginative re-staging of historic South African play “The Island” by John Kani, Winston Ntshona and Athol Fugard. Choreographed in collaboration with Khayelihle Dominique Gumede, the film records the staging of a somber dance mapping a fractured history onto moving bodies. Two pairs of dancers navigate the space as units, bearing each other’s weight in various ways to emerge as new, shared forms. In acts of repetition that situate the archive in the realm of the corporeal, the dancers carry large bones from one pile to another, moving back and forth in a cyclical pattern that suggests the continual unearthing of history and the passing of bodies through land and time. Simultaneously, exchanging bones from pile to pile proposes death as both systematic and unknown, connecting to Wa Lehulere’s larger interest in working through the troubling ruins of the apartheid era and the many graves, both real and imaginary, that have yet to be discovered.

Chapter 3: Feb. 24 – March 12

Vandy Rattana: MONOLOGUE

MONOLOGUE (2015), like other recent works by Vandy Rattana, weaves its narrative through the landscape of his Cambodian homeland—a landscape irrevocably shaped by a recent history of violence that he and others of his generation are only beginning to process. In this quiet and seemingly matter-of-fact video, we see a pair of mango trees overlooking a field; the only soundtrack is the artist's voice talking to a sister he never knew. As the work progresses we learn that she, along with her grandmother, was one of nearly 5,000 people who were killed by the Khmer Rouge in 1978 and buried beneath this lush pair of trees—fertilizing the farmland that fans out below them. Rattana asks her questions that will never be answered, reinforcing the stark solitude of his voice. He describes the experience of the trees and eating its fruits, talking about the inevitability of human violence alongside the fertility and beauty of the land while showing us a trio of farmers in the motions of planting and harvesting. We see him in the landscape too, dwarfed by the enormity of the trees, as he talks about delivering relics from this land to his parents. There is however, no closure, only more questions and the overriding sense of the incommensurability of cultural trauma and personal tragedy.   

Chapter 4: March 16 – 26

Ximena Garrido-Lecca: Toropukllay

Toropukllay (2012) takes as its subject the Fiesta Yawar—a ritual, public ceremony, and festival that takes place during the Independence Day celebrations of Peru in villages across the Andean highlands. A condor, captured by locals, is paraded through the town, and looked after in anticipation of a public event that entails the condor battling a bull in a ring. During the event, the condor is lashed to the back of the bull and set loose in an arena in front of a crowd. The bull rages, trying to fight off the condor as the majestic bird tries to attack the horned creature's eyes. For many Andean people, the fierce struggle between the two animals symbolizes the relationship between the Incas and the Spanish conquistadors. If any harm comes to the bird during the battle, locals believe it to be a bad omen for the coming year.  After the encounter, the condor—a sacred bird among the Andean people—is returned to the skies. Artist Ximena Garrido-Lecca captured the event in this video, focusing solely on the two creatures; depicting the gruesome and sometimes bloody spectacle in slow motion and set to a haunting, abstract soundtrack.  Even in slow frames, the battle is visceral, urgent, and disturbing—a history of violence that reenacts itself again and again before our eyes. First documented in the historical record in the 18th century, the Fiesta Yawar epitomizes the complexities of mestizaje—the process of cultural transformation and intermixing that resulted from the encounter between indigenous and European peoples in the Americas as a result of colonization.  The event, as depicted by Garrido-Lecca in this work, is at its very core a painful reminder of the legacy of colonial rule and its resounding presence in our contemporary moment. Between spirituality and religion, rural and urban life, indigenous and mestizo identities, and animal conservation and cultural tradition, two distinct worlds continue to exist—uncomfortably enduring one another.

Agnieszka Polska: Future Days 

Agnieszka Polska's Future Days (2013) takes place in a fictitious afterlife for avant-garde artists who, for one reason or another, have disappeared from the art world.  They wander and mingle, zombie-like, condemned to an eternity without a future. The protagonists include Paul Thek, Jerry Ludwiski, Wodzimierz Borowski, Lee Lozano, Charlotte Posenenske and Andrzej Szewczyk, played by actors wearing rubber masks resembling their characters. The haunting landscape, home to disappeared artworks as well, provides a backdrop for this meditation on the creation of mythologies and our fantasies about history.