Future Memories

Exhibited at the Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre, City University of Hong Kong

March to April 2021

This exhibition articulates a radically changed understanding of the image of landscape and nature in contemporary art. Over 200 inspiring works – including 3 groups of 40 works – by 34 international artists, were selected to form a trigger for a rethinking of the future challenges in dealing with a nature in transition. The exhibition is the result of a two-year phase of research and examination of artistic, scientific and ethical positions.

The lenticular print Beyond Homeostasis consists of three parts. The title implies that it is about a state that is beyond the state of equilibrium of an open but nevertheless regulated dynamic system. In other words, something that is out of balance. The work places the unconscious itself at the centre. This is done in an impressive way, as the motif of a structure located in an imaginary forest fades out for a moment when one walks through the work from left to right or right to left. At this moment of fading out, the surface suddenly turns black and one even suspects a glitch at first. But then the motif reappears. It is a non-place situated in some deep dark forest. Between tree trunks and dense undergrowth, a structure appears, which looks like the open maw of Azatoth, that demonic sultan and creator of all things, described in the Cthulhu myth of H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s absolute and cosmological unconscious and the collective unconscious, which according to Carl Gustav Jung expresses itself in archetypal images, are contrasted here with the relative, psychic, described by Sigmund Freud.

The unconscious stimulates us to creative actions that lead to works of art. That which is often understood as the soul of the artwork is a medium of an intersubjective communication that takes place between the artist and the viewer. It is a communication from unconscious to unconscious. With Beyond Homeostasis, Tobias Klein gives a home to our unease and fears that we have of the future. It is a true dystopian picture of climate change. Motionless, we stand in the centre and look at the black, non-visible chaos that has been blanked out. We fear that climate change is already here, but we don’t want to grasp it as an overall phenomenon and blank it out. And it is precisely in this moment of awakening that we know that we ourselves are already beyond homeostasis.