A new space dedicated to contemporary art has recently inaugurated on the cultural scene in Milan, but with a new point of view. It is called eastcontemporary: it overlooks via Luigi Pecchio 3, and is dedicated to promoting artists from Eastern Europe, inaugurating a cultural reflection that challenges the West-non-West dialectic. By helping to redefine the notion of art history, the gallery owners Julia Korzycka and Agnieszka Fąferek make us think about inclusiveness and new narratives. The story is animated by a plurality of voices that, never as today, we must listen and know, creating transnational synergies.

As the gallery owners have told, Eastcontemporary develops a curatorial program: Odds against tomorrow, born during the frozen time of the lockdown. By unfolding and interpreting Robert Smithson’s A tour of the Monument of the Passaic, the project involves the creation of exhibitions and events, engaging in a dialogue with artists whose research is focused on the theme of the future, always uncertain, especially today. The aim is to create a space with its own narrative. For this reason, the exhibitions that will follow develop around a single story whose themes we can all share: what is the future in a historical period in which everything has stopped?

The Future in Reverse is the first exhibition of the project, open until November 1, 2020. In the spaces of eastcontemporary, for the first time, Agata Ingarden and Agnieszka Polska, two Polish artists, interact. Using different media, such as installations, sculptures and videos, their research tells us about mythologies, metaphysics and the linearity of time.

Agata Ingarden presents three installations. Lucy (2018) is a metal structure from which hangs what looks like a black heart. It is caramel, charred sugar, which slowly melts filling oyster shells. It is an hourglass that measures time irregularly, subjected to the entropy of space. But it is also the manifestation of a different time, the geological one, which is now increasingly accelerated, matching the time of man. The two temporalities find their union in the work. The Mirror 2 consists of two sculptures made with acoustic foam, salt and crystallized butterflies covered with silicone. What are we facing? Relics of the past or objects of a dystopian future? Salt, which has always been used to preserve food, now helps to preserve the acoustic foam and the butterflies that metaphorically hold back the voices of the past. So, historia magistra vitae?

We design the future thinking (and looking) at the past, so the icons of art and monuments speak to us about what has been, as a warning to let us build what will be. Now art reflects on what will come, looking at the present, but the ghosts of the past continue to speak to us. So in Future Days (2013), Agnieszka Polska confronts us with artists of another time, but in a particular way. Her characters have impassive, mask-like faces with hollow eyes, and they are also quite creepy. They find themselves in an Eden, forced every day to live the same life, indeed, the same eternity. They are stuck in an immobile world that mirrors our condition. The video is the result of an artist’s residence: Agnieszka Polska, confronted with a situation of isolation, stages what we have all experienced, that is, a space and a time in which nothing changes.

Artists wander aimlessly, indeed they have forgotten what they were looking for, even asking themselves if they were looking for something. We understand then that the masters of the past are not presented as exempla to inspire us, but treated with humor and irony. We have inherited from postmodernity the end of faith in progress and a fragmented conception of time, ideals that have materialized in recent times. Let’s talk now about the future at a time when the future is more uncertain than ever. Everything is unstable, with faded edges. We have lived, and we live, in a time that has been stolen from us, we are no longer its masters, or perhaps we have never been. With its mission, Eastcontemporary offers a breath of fresh air in the city of Milan, questioning ideologies and constructs that are too deeply rooted in our society. It encourages new artistic practices, centered on themes that we can all experience: on the one hand, aspects of life that we have all found ourselves facing are highlighted, on the other, it seeks to stimulate critical awareness and the assumption of multiple points of view.

Alessandra Sebastiano

Info

Agata Ingarden e Agnieszka Polska. The Future in Reverse
30.09.2020 – 1.11.2020
eastcontemporary
Via Luigi Pecchio 3, Milano.