In the fringes of UNSEEN 2024 #9
I Have Seen the Future’ Jasper de Beijer at galerie dudokdegroot till 12th October
Amsterdam has a rich cultural life, so there are lots of galleries, and not all of them are at UNSEEN. Many of them specialise in photography. There are many in the Jordaan district, for example, around Hazenstaart and Lauriersgracht. There are sites with overviews like this one:
https://www.broersma.nl/theedit/de-mooiste-gallerys-van-amsterdam/
(unfortunately only in Dutch). A complete overview would take us too far (and my pen is leaking), but here’s an entry:
The recent project ‘I Have Seen the Future’ by Dutch artist Jasper de Beijer (1973) is based on the futurama presentation by the automobile company general motors during the World’s Fair in New York in 1939.This company presented a massive model of a landscape depicting how the United States could look in the future: a world where humanity would have unlimited access to natural resources and complete control over nature.
During the World’s Fair in 1964, a new scale model was presented that was even more exotic and ambitious than the previous one: humans would colonize the moon, explore the deep sea, and create machines that could autonomously build highways in the jungle. In reality, the feasibility of shaping the world turned out differently than expected. It proved to be a utopia, with past visions of the future characterized by manic wishful thinking combined with a painful lack of realism.
The fictional world in ‘ Have Seen the Future’ is one in which the inhabitants are trapped between different visions of the future and reality. These people strive to preserve the illusion at all costs while trying to force reality to resemble their dreams. During this process, they shatter their own reality to reshape their envisioned future, ultimately placing that future in the past. As a result, they are always one step behind, entirely fixated on perpetually creating a new version of the future.
In this project Jasper de Beijer explores the optimism with which he grew up in the 1970’s and how both he and the world around him increasingly realized that the idea of making the world as they wished was ill-suited to reality. By recreating the escapism of the 1970s, the artist positions himself as someone imposing his subjective vision on reality. This creates a tension where reality must yield to utopian thinking, even though that same utopia proves unworkable in reality.
De Beijer did his final exams in 1997. His photo series Buitenpost (2004) marked the first time he used models and staged scenes as a starting point for manipulated photographic images. In all his projects he refers to the collective memory., he delves into uncomfortable history and reshapes it to his own advantage for example in projects as Udongo (2009) and The Admirals Headache (2018-2020).
galerie dudokdegroot
Tweede Laurierdwarsstraat 1-3
1016 RA Amsterdam
www.debeijer.com
www.dudokdegroot.nl
John Devos
