Future Tense

It’s great when there’s some particularly inspiring art right on your doorstep.

The Future Tense and Future Now exhibitions at Derby’s Quad Cinema and cultural hub explore some fascinating questions:

What will the future look like?

Are we hopeful or fearful of it?

How much of a stake do we have in the outcome?

Future Now

‘Future nostalgia’ is a longing for the future we were promised, but was never delivered. War, poverty, inequality and suffering are still all around us, despite growing up in an era that promised scientific advancements to stop disease, make crops grow and give us all more leisure time.

This exhibition explores various perspectives on our human relationship with the concept of the future.

Kota Ishada is a UK artist born in Tokyo. His ‘photographic sculptures’ confront and challenge the traditional boundaries and limitations of the 2-dimensional photograph. By using 3-D printing and artificial intelligence he can digitally generate a 3-dimensional form from a photograph of deceased or distant loved ones and other historical figures. In a sense, we can then ‘touch’ people in a photograph that we could not do otherwise.

Future Tense

Tanya Habjouqa’s Birds Unaccustomed to Gravity opens the gallery area with a timely and poignant reflection on life in Gaza. Brief windows of happiness jostle with the all too frequent hostilities and confrontations of a ‘future that is only darkening’.

Aideen Barry’s Self Portrait (2021) comprises nine short films showing concurrently on separate screens. In each film she uses a part of her body within a different room of a model house, revealing a chaotic and dystopian view of herself ‘trapped’ in her home. Hard-won equalities and freedoms gained by women previously ‘chained to the kitchen sink’ in the last century suddenly felt to be in reverse during lockdown.

Arko Datto is a photographer from Kolkata. His Shunyo Raja (Kings of a Bereft Land) highlights the all-too-real impacts of climate change on the 300 million people living in the world’s biggest delta. We are confronted with our irrational appetite for materialism while ignoring the impact we have upon the very environment in which we exist. All the gold, prestige and riches are worthless in a cyclone or tsunami.

This is just a selection of the work on offer in what is a thought-provoking and engaging exhibition curated by Peggy Sue Amison and on until 30th June. QUAD is the host of Derby’s Format International Photography Festival, a major biennale in the arena of contemporary photography which I’ve volunteered to invigilate for. It’s great to see such thought-provoking quality work from around the world exhibited in the alternate ‘off’ years too.

Let’s try again

This exhibition reinforces how good art cannot simply be dismissed as inaccessible or highbrow. It’s about real people expressing their lives, hopes and fears. It is telling a story that moves us in a way we can relate to.

Future Tense speaks to us in a variety of ways that help build awareness, tolerance and understanding. How things are for us is not necessarily how they are for others. How things have been for us is not necessarily how they have to be in the future. Art can be a powerful way of showing – not telling – these stories in moving ways.

And people are more likely to act when something moves them. The future perhaps hasn’t panned out the way we hoped it would. But the heartening message in this exhibition is that – by its definition- any future always has a tomorrow. And we all have a stake in it. So if we didn’t get the last one right we can have another go.