I Never Promised You Dystopia is a virtual group exhibition that explores speculative futurisms with a focus on queer, feminist, and anti-capitalist ideologies. This exhibition features work by Bassam Al-Sabah, Kevin Gaffney, Vera Klute, Jesse Jones, and Doireann O’Malley.
To best enjoy I Never Promised You a Dystopia, use your cursor to “walk” through the gallery. To view the films in this exhibition please click on the artworks.
Click here to view the exhibition.
Virtual Event: Jesse Jones and Annie Kwan in Conversation. 8th Dec. 12:30pm GMT.
Book your free ticket here https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/in-conversation-jesse-jones-and-annie-jael-kwan-tickets-218915461037
Join artist Jesse Jones and Annie Jael Kwan, independent curator and researcher, in conversation in this virtual event as part of the Public Engagement Programming for I Never Promised You a Dystopia curated by Aoife Banks for Kilkenny Arts Office Emerging Curator in Residence Programme 2021.
Covid-19 has disrupted the perceptual world from a place of familiarity to that of a foreign landscape. We still see the world in terms of its old familiarity, but it is at the same time alienating as we are no longer able to interact with it in the habitual, effortless manner characteristic of the pre-pandemic world we inhabited. The reorienting of self in space and the shifting of perception that has occurred as a result of the pandemic has irrevocably altered our phenomenological experience of the world and how we perceive it. Our perspective of the world has been altered, but what do we make of it? Can we harness this newfound way of seeing and experiencing to reassess the world that we live in? Speculative futurism posits theories and potentialities for the world to come. Through the thinking of potential futures a temporal shift occurs within us; we engage in an act of time travel. I Never Promised You Dystopia sees future ideologies in the present and makes them tangible in the here and now.
I Never Promised You Dystopia is the third and final installment in a three-part curatorial project that explores the shifting of perspectives in three chapters: Past, Present, and Future. Positioning othered voices to the fore and providing new lenses with which to view our world, each exhibition focuses on an artist or artists whose work teases out alternative histories, hidden narratives, and speculative futures.
This exhibition is part of Kilkenny County Council Arts Office’s ‘Emerging Curator in Residence Programme’. This programme is enabling Aoife Banks to gain direct experience in the field of curating exhibitions for the Arts Office in Kilkenny. This opportunity provides Aoife with the platform to further develop her career, expand her artistic and creative networks, and avail of a mentoring programme with curator Eamonn Maxwell.
This exhibition is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and the works featured are from their Collection.
