Without Reality There Is No Utopia

Without Reality There Is No Utopia on show at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, focuses on the Big idea: ENCOUNTER: Engaging the social context. Actual reality has been supplanted by virtual reality, computer simulation and false narratives. Since the concept of utopia is based on the improvement of reality, the disappearance of the real also signals the end of utopia. The exhibition illustrates this premise by examining false narratives that masquerade as truth; the collapse of Communism in the 1980s; the current financial crisis, which heralds the demise of Capitalism; the contradictions inherent in geopolitics; and the explosion of democratic uprisings around the world.

The exhibition includes works by international artists as Alfredo Jaar, Carlos Motta, Daniel García Andujar, Dora García, El Roto, Ignasi Aballí, Judi Werthein, Katya Sander, Manolo Quejido, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Superflex, Wolfgang Tillmans and Zhou Xiaohu, among others; and features works of photography, video, drawing, painting, collage and more.

Without Reality There Is No Utopia is organized into asymmetric sections that consider shifts in global political realities. In the first section, Description of the Lie, the artists focus on how truth has been replaced in the media by false narratives created to hide covert operations or secret crimes. In The Collapse of Communism section the artists’s works examines the conditions leading up to, and the aftermath of, the fall of Communism. The Collapse of Capitalism section focuses on the current world financial crisis, as a result of a system based on consumerism, waste and the depletion of the planet’s resources. The Geopolitical, artists in this section question the roles of colonialism and the West on recent geopolitical uprisings. Democracy,this section traces the effects the of technology on communications, privacy and assembly and how they influence democracy.

Curated by Alicia Murría, Mariano Navarro and Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes and organized by the Centro Andaluz de Arte Conteporaneo in Seville, Spain.