“Future of Futures” workshop with Céline Condorelli, Grace Ndiritu, Liz Jensen, Nicole Yip, Nina Rune Essendrop, Prem Krishnamurthy, Sam Thorne, and Susan Ploetz. October 2019 at Nottingham Contemporary, UK.
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 twenty first century with what went before. All exhibitions invite us to travel in time, but this one insists on it.
Prem Krishnamurthy is a designer, curator, writer, and teacher. He is codirector of Wkshps, a multidisciplinary design practice; coartistic director of the 2022 iteration of FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art; and organizer of Present!, a participatory event series started in March 2020. Krishnamurthy has curated exhibitions internationally including Fikra Graphic Design Biennial 01: Ministry of Graphic Design, Sharjah, UAE; 13th A.I.R. Biennial, Let’s try listening again, New York; Creative Operational Solutions, Para Site, Hong Kong; and DIS-PLAY / RE-PLAY, Austrian Cultural Forum New York. He has written for numerous catalogues and magazines and has edited books with Berkeley Art Museum, Cabinet Books, Duke University Press, Paper Monument, and others. Previously, Krishnamurthy founded the experimental gallery P! and the design studio Project Projects. He received the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Communications Design in 2015 and his professional papers are held by the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. His experimental electronic book, P!DF, is available online.