Embedded in the glass architecture of the Schinkel Pavilion, the latest video work by the New York collective DIS imagines scenarios of existence that are far removed from the familiar strategies of linear historiography and knowledge production. The cross-genre science fiction documentary Everything but the World focuses on what is probably the most remote species inhabiting planet Earth today: humans.
Image above: courtesy Schinkel Pavillon / DIS
Rise and fall are close together in the fossil narrative of human history. Everything But The World questions post-Enlightenment notions of “progress” by connecting the repetitive mass production of the factory worker to the prehistoric ways of life practised by our ancestors as they moved from hunting and gathering to sedentary agriculture.
Between the speculative future and the recorded past, numerous protagonists guide us through the narrative, reality and fiction successively blurring into a flood of images that makes use of changing forms and formats – from the classic documentary to the YouTube tutorial to the TV show, from the widescreen to the vertical smartphone format. Interested in the human fascination with the dystopian end of time, the film traces – regardless of absolute truths and conventions – the borderlands of the possible.
It may be difficult to grasp from the perspective of our scarce lifetimes, but history is not a narrative of evolutions and constants, but of changes and revolutions. When we realise that our world is only one possibility among many, what worlds might await us after the end of the world as we know it?
Bio:
DIS is a collaborative project by Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso and David Toro. Based in New York, the collective works both artistically and curatorially across a broad range of media and platforms that utilise methods of producing, using and distributing content online. In 2010, they first founded the online magazine DIS Magazine. This was later followed by an image database (DISimages) and an online shop (DISown) with products and accessories designed by artists. In 2018, the magazine was replaced by the streaming platform dis.art.
From the beginning, DIS has also realised artistic projects alongside the magazine and acted on other platforms, such as exhibitions at MoMA and the New Museum in New York. In 2016, the collective curated the Berlin Biennale; most recently, they co-curated the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2021 there with Andrea Bellini, the director of the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève.
Curated by Klara Hülskamp & Lina Louisa Krämer
WHEN?
Opening: Friday, 3 February 2023, 6:00 – 11:00 pm
With DJ sets by DJ Bobby Beethoven & Shayne Oliver.
Exhibition dates: Friday, 3 February – Sunday, 26 February 2023
WHERE?
Schinkel Pavilion
Oberwallstraße 32
10117 Berlin-Mitte
