As part of the PHOTO 2024 festival, the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) in Fitzroy, Australia announces its feature exhibition ‘Only the future revisits the past’. Here is the text of presentation.
In this internationally significant exhibition, artists look towards the past to speculate future possibilities and consider change. It is well established that photography and film record the past, but these types of documents can also transform and dictate the future. The title, ‘Only the future revisits the past’ is drawn from Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), a novel which in part deals with generational trauma, the past haunting the present, and the ways people process the past to consider their future.
This exhibition brings together artists Marta Bogdańska, Omar Victor Diop, Nikki Lam, Tace Stevens and Stephanie Syjuco whose works look towards the past – via archives, institutional and museum collections, family histories, and historic depictions – to speculate future conditions and possibilities. Through deep engagement and considered intervention, these artists disrupt received structures and narratives, and in doing so explore ideas of agency and the limitations of representation. This exhibition, curated by Catlin Langford, questions the formulation of accepted knowledge and accounts, and asks: what role does memory and history play in forming our futures?
Only the future revisits the past
until May 12, 2024
Centre for Contemporary Photography
404 George Street, Fitzroy Vic 3065
Wed – Sun 11am – 5pm
www.ccp.org.au
