Writing the History of the Future

ZKM | Center for Art and Media presents key artworks from its media art collection at the Gwangju Museum of Art, South Korea. ZKM’s collection is the largest of its kind in the world, featuring some of the greatest media artists of all time. The exhibition, curated by Peter Weibel, Margit Rosen, Clara Runge, and Philipp Ziegler, is based on a “new media-historical model”, or rather a way to show history on the basis of the social and aesthetic changes brought by technology.

“Writing the History of the Future” was previously exhibited time at the ZKM. Gwangju Museum of Art hosts an adapted exhibition jointly produced by the GMA and the ZKM within the framework of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in the field of media art.

Anytime a new technology has been released, a revolution in art has occurred: the exhibition traces a genealogy of those radical changes by bringing together around 90 works in six sections that reveal the transformation of the genre of portraiture, the representation of the body, landscape, and architecture by the media, as well as the change in our conception of human and machine creativity.

The exhibition features artists Marina Abramović, Refik Anadol, John Baldessari, Dara Birnbaum, Erick Calderon (Snowfro), Peter Campus, Jake Elwes, Harun Farocki, Gerard Ferrandez (ge1doot), Kiyoshi Furukawa, Walter Giers, Shilpa Gupta, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Gary Hill, Candida Höfer, Jenny Holzer, Nan Hoover, Joan Jonas, Hiroshi Kawano, Bernd Lintermann, Laurent Mignonneau, Manfred Mohr, Vera Molnár, Wolfgang Münch, Frieder Nake, Bruce Nauman, Georg Nees, Tony Oursler, Nam June Paik, Pipilotti Rist, Ulrike Rosenbach, Thomas Ruff, Zbigniew Rybczyński, Jeffrey Shaw, Christa Sommerer, Steina, Thomas Struth, Aldo Tambellini, Ulay, Woody Vasulka, Bill Viola, Wolf Vostell, Peter Weibel, Erwin Wurm, a.o. and others.