Location: Cemeti – Institute for Art and Society
Date: June 5 – 30, 2018
Hours: 10:00 – 17:00
ALMANAK
a speculation by artist Natasha Tontey
in collaboration with curator Syafiatudina
Exhibition Schedule
- Opening
Tuesday, June 5, 2018, 19.00 - Exhibition
Every working day, 5 – 30 June 2018
[Please note that from 12-18 June 2018 Cemeti will be closed for Eid Mubarak holidays.]
Public Programme
- Trip 0.2.1. Speculations Crash Course I
Workshop by Natasha Tontey and Syafiatudina
Tuesday 19 June 2018, 15.00–18.00 hrs - Trip 0.2.2. Speculations Crash Course II
Workshop by Natasha Tontey and Syafiatudina
Wednesday 20 June 2018, 15.00–18.00 hrs
0.0. What if I said that you can be a cosmic traveller and just a boring ordinary person living in a cubicle and an exciting psychonaut in the age of iOs at the same time?
ALMANAK is a project by artist Natasha Tontey in collaboration with curator Syafiatudina. It consists of two parts: an exhibition with new artworks by Natasha Tontey (5-30 June 2018) and a series of public events called “Trips”, in which Tontey and curator Syafiatudina respond to the project’s key concerns, questions and imaginations.
0.6. Predictions, prophecies, auguries and omens: all are speculative futures that might or not happen. But they are futures. A future past perhaps. What is past, present and future anyway?
Coming from an interest in speculations and future telling, Natasha Tontey started collecting prophecies from late 2015 onwards. During this past year and a half, she met with mediums, shamans, paranormals, psychics and fortune tellers, slowly building “an archive of the future”. However, it turned out that all these prophecies still heavily rely on existing social norms and power structures, from the prediction of becoming someone’s wife to bearing children before turning thirty, to stereotypical behaviours to characterising one’s personality based on appearance. The question that arises is whether it is possible to undo the strings of the present and past that hold our future speculations? And what does an alternative future mean to you?
0.9. On behalf of the whole universe of absurdity, narration and potentiality of speculative thinking through imagination. We declare war on rational thinking!
Using a pseudo science-fiction narrative and taking inspiration from xenofeminism, Natasha Tontey developed a new video work exploring the possibility of alternative and speculative futures through a plausible cosmic solution, crossing the borderline between what is real and what is not, drawing together past, present and future. Its plot involving some kind of inscrutable time paradox, a glitchy digital animation, a lost Indonesian space age characterized by the Semarang building Apotek Sputnik, and a giant, immortal cockroach. Tontey has furthermore written a manifesto entitled The Manifesto of Tactile and Fanciful Tactics on how to build a Speculative Future through 1.0 list of an alternative and plausible cosmic solution, some points of which intersect this post.
0.5. If life is stranger than fiction, then fiction is stranger than speculation, then speculation is stranger than life. We see it that way. A loop.
The project’s title refers to an empty calendar containing important dates and statistical information such as astronomical data and tide tables. ALMANAK however is based on a cyclical notion of time, in which the distinction between past and future is cancelled out. The chronological origin is even less important. In doing so, an imaginary possibility that draws together past, present and future is conjured up. ALMANAK offers a way to keep moving whilst embracing a nonlinear future and unlearning the current system with frictions and fictions.
Documentation picture:
This exhibition is the sixth and last of Cemeti’s Berbagi series of exhibitions, consisting of projects experimenting with different forms of collaborative practice. Berbagi marks the second draft of our current Maintenance Works programme (January 2017-June 2018).
CEMETI 