Icestorm

03 May - 03 July 2005

Carol Bove, Gerard Byrne, Cerith Wyn Evans, Liam Gillick, Jim Isermann, Dorit Margreiter, and Christian Philipp Müller

 

ICESTORM attempts to critically re-evaluate the social, political and cultural legacies of modernity from a contemporary perspective. Starting point, parallel narrative and methodological blueprint of the international group show is Ang Lee's 1997 film 'The Ice Storm'.

 

After the end of postmodernity, modernism ceases to appear to us as a monolithic entity and linear historical trajectory but rather emerges as a complex topography of locally distinct articulations and experiences of modernity. The contemporary fragmentation and spatialisation of our understanding of modernity opens up the possibility of re-reading its diverse histories in the light of their local specificity as well as questioning their implications for the present.

The artists represented in ICESTORM share a common interest in reconstructing particular instances and aspects of modernity to thus propose alternative readings of its diverse articulations. Above all, there is a new desire to unearth and re-evaluate the lost or disfigured traces and unrealised potentialities of modernity’s utopian dimension. Here, (the history of) utopian thought is not primarily understood as being contaminated by the threat of totalitarianism, but as a politically indispensable capacity to re-imagine potential alternatives to the facticity of the present.