The Coming World 2075
Group exhibition at Gyre Gallery - Tokyo, Japan, 2025
Participants: Andrea Samory, Ai Makita , Daisuke Ida , Iona Zur | Curation: Takayo Iida, Yohsuke Takahashi
In a city of the future, the rain falls relentlessly. The deluge has gone on for years. It has altered people’s imaginations and desires, and they dream of a boundless arid desert. In the cinema, clips from the movies Solaris and La Jetée play on a loop, set to Bach chorale preludes—serving as a fragmented depiction of the “coming world.” The Coming World gives real urgency to the theme of our relationship with nature, highlighting challenges such as climate change, species extinction, pollution, renewable energy and overpopulation. This allows us to think about nature from a distinctly relational perspective, and in so doing bring about new knowledge and technologies within both our transcendental and everyday knowledge of nature. As a result, technology will change human minds and bodies in ways that will allow us to adapt to the natural environment of the coming world.
Martin Heidegger's essay The Age of the World Picture sees the present as an era of representation in which the dominance of media and technology have become evident, and he presents a critical view of this media society. With humans becoming the agents in the process of representing the world, he calls the world bound together as this representation the “world picture.” He also suggests that by ushering in cooperativity through the media, modern subjectivity could lead to a totalitarian world in which subject and object are immersively united (“planetary imperialism”).
Modern society has lauded the “universal values” of freedom, human rights, and democracy. But it has also affirmed limitless human desire, and the capitalism that is driven by this desire has become globalized, leading to fierce competition among nations over their national interests.
Based on the premise of a contemporary aporia (a difficult problem with no solution), this exhibition will convey messages from artists who come up with new protocols for communication, intervening in the sphere of public decision-making.
Takayo Iida (Exhibition Curator / Director of the Sgùrr Dearg Institute for Sociology of the Arts)
