Speculation and Decay

Curated by: Maja Burja

With: Maja Bojanić, Alberto Harres, Vid Koprivšek, Matej Mihevc, OMSK Social Club, Gaia Radić, Room 69, Lex Rütten, Mario Santamaria, Dorijan Šiško, Jana Kerima Stolzer

7–17 November 2024

Nova Gorica City Gallery, Tir Gallery, Agorè Gallery, Carinarnica

The exhibition explores the potential of fiction to reconstitute a relationship with a world ravaged beyond repair. Against the backdrop of numerous crises facing humanity and the planet, our narratives of continuous growth are dissolving, and it is becoming increasingly clear that progress has always been bound with collapse. The present moment is marked by a sense of loss, while the past, the present and the future are harder to unravel than ever. As imaginaries of what was once an open future turn into increasingly bleak prospects, the two main remaining forces in the world are steady decay and rampant speculation, which shape climates and markets, mines and bodies, atoms and bits.

Speculation and decay, appropriated as creative processes, become an opening for exploring alternative currents of the past, the present and the future, which embrace the ruptures, disruptions and unknown signs of the present moment in order to form a multiplicity of parallel worlds. Worlds that sprawl across archives and within virtual space, embed within infrastructural backrooms, emerge in latent vectors of generative processes or slowly rot on the web, surrender themselves to the forces of desolate natural and urban sites, inhabit the media of the past like ghosts and seep through unconventional channels … Physical and virtual spaces, porous and plastic in the processes of world-making, become sandboxes for narrative reprogramming, connecting to phenomena and time scales beyond human perception, and exploring liminal forms of subjectivity.