Group Exhibition Jia Yuan Hai Art Museum, Shanghai
Landscapes of Futures Past is an exhibition of contemporary video art, digital animation, installation, and traditional artistic media such as tapestry and painting, reframed through the lens of our digitized era. Bringing together artists from Australia, China, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, Russia, Singapore, and the U.K., the exhibition unfolds as a visual journey through the terrains and multiverses of time and space.
A landscape is a terrain, or a view of it, onto which we project our aesthetic, emotional, spiritual, and physical needs. What we perceive in the land is not only what is physically there, but also what we bring to it: a sense of history and a longing for future, as well as a desire for beauty, a feeling of identity and belonging, or a fear of the unknown, a drive for survival, a hunger for control.
The works shown here are vessels for stories that unfold across time, revealing how landscapes are not static scenes, but living archives of human presence, absence, imagination and desire. The paradox of “futures past” written into the exhibition’s title evokes spaces where both timelines collide, where utopias are imagined and erased, where memories and myth become embedded in the ground beneath our feet.
Whether on a scientific or a metaphysical level, the understanding of time and space is most often a dichotomy between the circular and the linear — between traditional and quantum cosmologies that view time as cyclical or fluid, and other frameworks that measure it as linear and progressive. This tension underpins the temporal dislocations in Landscapes of Futures Past, where imagined futures and ancestral pasts converge, collapse, and reconfigure the landscapes that we inhabit and that others will inherit.
The unspoilt rural landscape of Jiading and its subtle relationship with the architecture of Tadao Ando’s new Jiayuanhai Art Museum, are active participants in this exhibition. The interplay of circular and linear elements in the museum’s design mirrors the exhibition’s meditation on time and space — where past and future fold into the present. More than a container for art, the museum itself acts as a perceptual frame, not only for the artworks but also for the landscape beyond, which its windows — and the exhibition — invite us to see anew.
Imagining the world’s pasts, presents, and futures, the works in this exhibition offer layered narratives about what it means to be alive in times of transformation. As global populations expand and economies accelerate, the landscapes we inhabit grow increasingly fragile — physically, culturally, and ecologically. Through their poetic and critical engagement in the present, the artworks navigate the recursive cycles of possible futures alongside the fractured, often linear timelines, of the past to reveal how memory and foresight intersect.
Some works reach back into ancestral geographies, where the earth resounds with echoes of identity, ritual, and resilience. Others confront ruptures — colonial scars, forced migrations and environmental erasures — that fracture our connection with the landscape and cast shadows on our future and past. Through intimate storytelling, speculative fictions, and poetic observations, these works invite viewers to gaze into the gaps between personal and collective memory to examine the landscapes we still carry within us, as well as those we have left behind.
In the spaces between what has been, what was hoped for, what remains, and what is still to come, artists sow the seeds of forgotten futures and remembered pasts in the hope that new narratives will take root.
Curated by: David Elliott & Rachel Rits-Volloch
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