October 2, 2021 – March 30, 2022
The exhibition Chronicles of the Future Superheroes is based on the book by the American inventor Ray Kurzweil, Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine, which follows the efforts of a young woman to solve the great global problems with the help of knowledge and technology. Written from a dual perspective, that of a futuristic thinker and that of a woman in the making, Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine is a textbook that helps us position ourselves in the face of things to come and for which we must be prepared, from migration to global warming, from various forms of economic competitiveness to emotional transformation and the ability to share.
Two performative interventions will take place throughout the opening: K-Meat Restaurant’s Restaurateur, a durational performance proposed by Hyunjin Bek that reflects the process of preparing his last roles for television, on the border between meditation, the change of identity and the saving component of localism, and Being Nina, an immersive performance in which Adina Mocanu approaches the story of Nina Kulagina, a woman with transcendental abilities who worked in the middle of the last century in the USSR, and re-enacts some of Nina’s famous experiments.
“The twelve artists selected to enter the conversation with Danielle start from the interest in exploring the unknown or from the idea of play(fulness), aiming to extrapolate personal experiences in relation to the future. The positions presented in the exhibition are the result of hybrid practices, at the border between visuality, architecture, choreography, engineering and performance. Equally, the exhibition outlines the idea of a meta-community located outside of global dystopia, at a point where geographical regions (Southeast Asia and Southeast Europe) and digital channels intersect, sometimes creating chaos and in other circumstances, a stability as contagious as it is oppressive.
The Chronicles of the Future Superheroes, a project conceived over the past two years, works as a device that aims to analyze the function of art in relation to a young audience that is looking for answers to questions about the passage of time and aging, the future of the planet, the relationship with the paranormal or the balance between local and global. The program of performances and workshops is focused on the relationship between the individual and the community, the architecture of the exhibition space coming to support this working formula”. Anca Verona Mihuleţ
Anca Verona Mihuleţ is a Romanian art historian and independent curator based in Seoul. The projects proposed by Anca Mihuleț are motivated by specific historic and social coordinates, by the institutional frameworks where they take place – museums, biennials, galleries, alternative spaces or mobile structures, such as residencies – but also by her artistic and curatorial collaborations that unfold over the course of several years. Starting with 2011, Mihuleţ has been interested in questioning and theorizing various curatorial contexts, by participating in several fellowships and residencies – at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea or the Curatorial Intensive seminar held by Independent Curators International at the Ullens Art Center, Beijing. Between 2006 and 2013, together with Liviana Dan, Anca Mihuleţ curated the exhibition program of The Contemporary Art Gallery of the Brukenthal National Museum in Sibiu, Romania. In 2011, together with Apparatus 22 and Olivia Mihălţianu, she worked on the research project and exhibition Situated Knowledge. I Follow Rivers of Thoughts at the Romanian Institute for Culture and Humanist Research in Venice. In 2013, she was the curator of the exhibition Reflection Center for Suspended Histories. An Attempt, presented as one of the two Romanian Pavilions at the 55th edition of the Venice Biennale. In 2014, she organized, in collaboration with S-AIR Sapporo and Japan Foundation, an artistic residency in Romania under the title Conditional Landscape, that continued in Sapporo in 2015, with focus on winter landscape. In 2015 and 2016, together with Patrick D. Flores, Anca Mihuleţ curated the exhibition South by Southeast, which was presented at Osage Art Foundation in Hong Kong and The Guangdong Times Museum in Guangzhou. Between 2015 and 2017, Mihuleţ, in collaboration with Diana Marincu, curated The White Dot and The Black Cube, an exhibition project in six parts, presented at The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest. In 2016, she prepared an exhibition dedicated to the development of the Romanian art at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, which was presented at the Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center in Manila. In 2016, Mihuleţ was awarded one of the ”Igor Zabel Grants”. She worked in the curatorial team of Singapore Biennale 2019, a context in which she researched cases of artistic displacement and naturalization, together with modes in which transmediality can influence our perception onto the future. In 2019 she was awarded the first Bega Art Prize by Kunsthalle Bega. Between 2020 and 2022, Mihuleț is being part of the curatorial team of STRP, a festival of art and technology taking place in Eindhoven.
Photo: Lawrence Lek, AIDOL, video still; HD video, stereo sound, 83 mins., 2019. Courtesy of Lawrence Lek and Sadie Coles HQ, London