The issue for 2016 is Fictive Dreams.
As the ink on the epitaph of globalisation dries, the world’s nations reel from an unknown future. A future that is only experienced through the rise of a nationalist inclination in a number of countries; the potential breakdown of trade and people to partnerships; the great migration of people despite rising border controls; and recycling of late 20th century artists and their aesthetics as a new frontier of the future.
In an unevenly even period of a meta-historical fissure, what foretells a future outside of fear, terror and breakdown? Is there a future in the real?
A new fictional world interplays rapid dreams, digital desires and humorous nightmares resuscitating flailing histories and memories of an expired epoch. It is a moment where art seeks contingency over agency; mobility over fixity; and burial over excavation. A new de-ideologised dreamscape unfolds as old myths magically dissipate and welcome a blurry sequence of imaginings of the real. Strangeness unfolds. We no longer know our neighbour. As the 21st century foregrounds a world of global human movement and mobility (deterritorialised as citizens) and presents postmodern warfare on lives, nature and the human condition, a need to imagine a new world is urgent. What is the future of the world?
In this Issue, artists, curators and scholars traverse land and sea; cities and communities; ideas and ideologies; and image and imaginings to mediate on multiple notions of histories, geographies, politics, economies and aesthetics: thereby producing a rich reflection on an emerging new world/s through the lens of art and its imagining.
