Present Continuous

Present Continuous
Benji Boyadgian, Taha Heydari, Farzaneh Hosseini, Christine Kettaneh, Siavash Naghshbandi, Timo Nasseri, Anahita Razmi
Co-curated by Katharina Ehrl and Davood Madadpoor

Our history, identity, and collective memory are built upon a collection of objects, documents, stories, and experiences. What connects the works in these three exhibitions is the artistic practice that marks tension by interrogating and recasting everyday objects and events to draw out their relationships to contemporary experience in a landscape of successive social and political change. Apart from the imminent need to consider the historical context from which this current state of affairs has emerged, the chosen works reflect on contemporaneity as a concept that captures the frictions of the present.

Everyday life is a crust of earth over the tunnels and caves of the unconscious and against a skyline of uncertainty and illusion… while overhead stretch the Heavens of Permanence… Henri Lefebvre

Present Continuous emphasizes three aspects that interact with and—partly consciously, partly unconsciously—influence our lives with varying levels of intensity: everyday life, media, and transformation. Thinking about everyday life seems too banal, but contemporaneity, and hence our everyday life, is a mix of origin, transition, and an unknowable future. Media is a major element within society. Its development and social change are related since development has increased the complexity of societal actions and engagements. The exhibited artists work through all these impacts and changes, reflecting and taking up these events, which have become so ordinary for us that we almost classify them as commonplace. Present Continuous is an invitation to pay close attention to the artists’ tireless concern with topics that we know very little about and (mostly) do not actively participate in, which profoundly affect our lives.