A visit to MoMA PS1 comes with a guarantee of seeing great art. This museum never disappoints and often helps us to discover artists we aren’t familiar with. But this time we left EXPO 1: New York, the exhibition currently on display, with an even stronger feeling. This show has the potential to become a cultural landmark, something people will still talk about in ten years, just like Altermodern or Sensations.
EXPO 1: New York brings together different narratives that deal with some of the big challenges of our time. The overarching theme is “dark optimism” a term coined by Triple Canopy platform and referring to “an attitude that encompasses both the seeming end of the world and its beginning, one that is positioned on the brink of apocalypse and at the onset of unprecedented technological transformation”.
The artworks on display deal in their own way with ecological challenges set against the backdrop of economic turmoil and sociopolitical upheaval that has made a dramatic impact on our daily life. But to bring this big idea into existence, the curators have built an ecosystem of group and solo shows, all exploring different elements of this dark optimism idea and demonstrating the complexity and interdependency between them.
Amongst the artworks shown at PS1 are:
a monographic exhibition of photographs by Ansel Adams, whose prescient regard for nature continues to resonate today; the re-installation of Meg Webster’s serene ecosystem “Pool” (first presented at the museum in 1998); the group show ProBio
that explores technology’s radical and accelerating impact on the body and the human condition; an immersive installations “La inocencia de los animales” by
Adrián Villar Rojas who has turned a room into a stage resembling both an amphitheater of antiquity and a post-apocalyptic cavern, and; Olafur Eliasson’s new installation “Your Waste of Time”, that transforms one of the museum’s rooms into a giant freezer.
Adrián Villar Rojas who has turned a room into a stage resembling both an amphitheater of antiquity and a post-apocalyptic cavern, and; Olafur Eliasson’s new installation “Your Waste of Time”, that transforms one of the museum’s rooms into a giant freezer.
This last piece lets the you walk amongst massive pieces of ice that broke off from Iceland’s largest glacier, Vatnajökull. Knowing that the oldest ice in the glacier is estimated to have originated some 800 years ago, it confronts you in a very direct way to the theme.
Expo1: New York is on display till September this year. It is a real must-see.
