THE NEW HUMAN: YOU AND I IN GLOBAL WONDERLAND

THE NEW HUMAN is a video-based exhibition project that artistically explores feelings of uncertainty, frustration, fear, bewilderment and confusion about the human condition today. It also gives a glimpse of some imagined scenarios of our future. The project has been madepossible through a substantial collaboration between Moderna Museet Malmö and the Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf. The work presented in the project has been produced since the turn of the last millennium and spans from seminal contemporary classics to very recent productions. At Moderna Museet Malmö, THE NEW HUMAN will be presented in two extensive chapters, each with a different focus and subtitle: You and I in Global Wonderland (2015) and Knock, Knock, is Anyone Home? (2016). A further chapter will thereafter be presented at Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2016).

You and I in Global Wonderland will focus on how we look at and interact with one another as human beings in a new world. We’ll get to share experiences of gigantic transformation and human migration brought on by war, climate change, and economic globalization. There will be works that explore the political and religious extremism of our time, and others that remind us of the colonial past and how it continues to affect the way we live together as humans today. As an exhibition, You and I in Global Wonderland may convey a longing for something lost—perhaps an earlier life ruined by war—but it will also present us with feelings of bewilderment, tenderness, disorientation and comedy that arise from confrontations between different cultures, languages and lifestyles.

Knock, Knock is Anyone Home? will catapult us into a virtual universe of hyper-real avatars and parallel worlds. In this chapter we’ll encounter human-looking characters that appear to have mutated with communication technologies and capitalist strategies to become something Other, something that on the surface looks human but is fundamentally nonhuman. A number of works in this chapter seem to point towards a shift—perhaps a devolution of mankind, or a transformation into something new. We here enter worlds in which the semantic order seems to implode and we find that language no longer connects to what we see. Known categories dissolve and disparate objects and materials seem to fuse and melt into one another. New amalgamations are being formed and a future human existence appears fundamentally uncertain.

Participating artists include: Ed Atkins, Trisha Baga, Yael Bartana, Robert Boyd, Loulou Cherinet, Ioana Cojocario, Cao Fei, Esra Ersen, Isaac Julien, Helen Marten, Santiago Mostyn, Adrian Paci, Tomáš Rafa, Mika Rottenberg, Frances Stark, Ryan Trecartin, Ferhat Özgür.

Curator: Joa Ljungberg.