About

The exhibition’s title cites Laurie Anderson’s 1982 song “From the Air,” which channels and distills a widely felt intuition that disaster is at hand. Itself, a pun on the expression conveying zeitgeist; the song expresses symptoms of and reasons for this intuition. There seemed to be, at the time, a loss of personal control over one’s own fate, much less the world’s. The speed and quantity of technology were faster than any one person could keep up with. While news of global crises just as quickly spread and, similarly, piled up.

How can the state of things in 1982 register truer now than it was then? Other dystopian classics like Ray Bradbury’s, Fahrenheit 451 and George Orwell’s, 1984 that served as warnings to our school-aged selves reverberate now; 30 years later (give or take). The unreal imagined is the real unimaginable. Developments in media and technology, fiction decades ago, have come to pass, and fake news, alienation and authoritarian governments are indeed ascendent.

Curator Carlos Rigau states: “It’s more convoluted, constructed, and more divisive than ever before. […] Both sides are using this political strategy… to basically make you choose one or another when in fact it’s both.  The divisiveness has created a thick smoke screen that we can’t see through. Just as the art of the fifties was very much about post-Fascism – modernism tried to construct art as if there was no past. The moment we’re in now is utter confusion.”

For curator Carlos Rigau, the resulting state of shock and paralysis marks the art of our time. Another reference point is that of Iceberg B-17, which broke off from a major continental ice shelf and drifted near the coast of Australia in the early 2000s.  After that, another iceberg, A-68 emerged as a media star in 2020. Both became media touchpoints as evidence for and against climate change. Ultimately, they both melted away.