Future Tense: Microcinema Screening

We are living in a time of crisis. Anxieties about the future and questions concerning the sustainability of the planet and its inhabitants have never felt more urgent. Future Tense asks how artists approach these and other global uncertainties in relationship to identity, home, and environment. Selected films highlight both the fragility and resilience of human ingenuity in relationship to nature, space, and place. Collectively, the artists included in this program direct themselves towards the future. They look to the past to reclaim lost histories while simultaneously imagining new possible futures. Participating artists: Imani Dennison, Fang Tianyu, Thomas Allen Harris, Pedro Neves Marques, Joan Michel, Su Yu-Hsin, Wang Mowen, and Zheng Yuan.

Barbara London is a New York-based curator and writer who founded the video-media exhibition and collection programs at The Museum of Modern Art, where she worked between 1973 and 2013. Her current projects include the book Video/Art: The First Fifty Years (Phaidon: 2020), the podcast series Barbara London Calling, and the exhibition Seeing Sound (Independent Curators International, 2020-24). London’s writing has appeared in numerous catalogs and publications, including Artforum, Yishu, Leonardo, Art Asia Pacific, Art in America, and Modern Painter. London teaches in the Sound Art Department, Columbia University, and previously taught in the Graduate Art Department, Yale University, 2014-19.

Ellen Larson is a PhD candidate at the University of Pittsburgh, focusing her doctoral research on contemporary video art from Asia. She has curated exhibitions and educational symposia in the United States and China.

Co-presented with University of Pittsburgh’s SCREENSHOT: ASIA Program