Join the curators of Still Here Tomorrow To High Five You Yesterday for a curator-led walkabout of the exhibition which is realised in ‘Chapters’. The walkabout will unpack the various themes in Chapter One and how the works selected allow for multiple readings of the space.
Please note that this event is free with museum admission or Zeitz MOCAA Membership. RSVP is essential. Click here to secure your place.
Still Here Tomorrow to High Five You Yesterday, an exhibition at Zeitz MOCAA, explores the different ways in which artists, performers, writers and architects tackle the complexities inherent within the dual concepts of utopia and progress. Entering emergent spaces that exist both in the realm of the mind and in the physical unknown, the exhibition points critically to the mirages, metaphors, stereotypes and matrixes that accompany the notion of progress.
Through the works of contemporary artists from Africa and the diaspora, the exhibition engages with the phenomenon of travel and migration through imagined, alternative realities that reference both fixed and immaterial locations at once.
Musician Sun Ra speaks of “”¦unknown things, impossible things, ancient things and potential things”¦”, in this way the exhibition enters alternative stratospheres, allowing viewers to explore the “multiple simultaneous utopianisms” (Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum), that inhabit our perceptions and worlds.
The artists in this exhibition offer a distinct concept in which time is no longer linear but cyclical, inter-dimensional and experiential, a realm full of infinite moments of potential clash – where past, present and future collapse into one. Evoking a place yet-to-be-known or made visible, the exhibition challenges the idea that utopia is synonymous with escapist pursuits. Instead, the works of artists offer an acute and poetic way of critiquing existing societies.
Born from the tropes of Afrofuturistic movements and notions of space travel, the exhibition is realised in ‘Chapters’, that unfold and progress over the run of the exhibition, to present a plurality of post-colonial futures. In this way the exhibition shapes and shifts in the gallery, disrupting and distorting both the constructs of utopia and its opposite, dystopia, encouraging more nuanced perspectives on the future.
