ArchiveExhibition
Our Silver City, 2094
20 Nov 2021-18 Apr 2022
Nottingham Contemporary
Nottingham NG1 2GB
Overview
Our Silver City travels to the end of this century, featuring works from the last 400 million years. It is an exhibition-as-sci-fi-novel, or vice-versa.
Crossing the gallery threshold, we step into a possible future world. This world has been reshaped by decades of crisis and collapse: resource wars and evacuations, plastic-eating bacteria and flooding. Once known as Nottingham, the Silver City is set against a backdrop of fire seasons and widening waterways. Here, communities have embraced different forms of colour production, weather forecasting and spirituality.
This exhibition is imagined as a journey unfolding across four galleries, orientated to the cardinal points. It traces a route from change to understanding, from inner knowledge to wisdom. Along the way, we encounter a selection of artefacts, remnants and artworks connecting the long 21st century with what went before. All exhibitions invite us to travel in time, but this one insists on it.
Based on a methodology by Prem Krishnamurthy, Our Silver City has been developed by the artists Céline Condorelli, Femke Herregraven and Grace Ndiritu, and the novelist Liz Jensen, in close dialogue with Krishnamurthy and the Nottingham Contemporary team. It is accompanied by a novella by Jensen, and extends across the city via a programme developed with young people.
Our Silver City asks: How might art envision, prototype and practice new ways of being in the uncertain future? Who were “we” before we became “we”? Where are we going? And how might we get there?
Artists and Contributors:
Roger Ackling, Anni Albers, Anna Barham, Adam Bletchly, Chiara Camoni, Revital Cohen and Tuur van Balen, Céline Condorelli, Isa Genzken, Femke Herregraven, Charlotte Johannesson, Hannah Catherine Jones, On Kawara, The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, Agnieszka Kurant, Nicola L, Vivian Lynn, Angus McBean, Anthony McCall, Eline McGeorge, Sandra Mujinga, Grace Ndiritu, John Newling, B.J. Nilsen, Nottingham City Museums, Asad Raza, Delphine Reist, Ben Rivers, Connie Samaras, Cauleen Smith, Michael E. Smith, Jenna Sutela, Elisabeth Wild, Zara Zandieh and Andrea Zittel.
Liz Jensen's novella, Our Silver City, 2094, can be read online HERE
