The Archeological Gaze
The neologism « Archeonauts », from which this exhibition draws its title, is a portmanteau conflating the root of « archeology » with a word meaning « seafarers » in ancient Greek.
The word « Archeonaut » identifies an archetype, that of a being in a state of itinerancy, a traveler through time and space, a wayfarer moving back and forth between West and East and deploying him- or herself in the networks of the Internet; it suggests a meeting of faraway worlds and unpredictable junctions between « the pasts and the futures, the future pasts and the past futures » (Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archeology, 2012). Thus, this neologism pinpoints an anthropological universal involved in a quest for meaning through an archeological gaze.
Against this backdrop, the exhibition « Archeonauts » attempts to bring together a group of artists who are also activists, theorists and visionaries. Out of sync with the present, like beings from a distant future confronting the artistic and technological ruins of a lost civilization, they delve into a global pre- and post- internet material and immaterial culture.
Drifting through a plurality of timelines in an attempt to reclaim possible futures, these artists cast an archeological gaze born of a disarticulation of time that is typical of our age, setting forth a series of « polychronic and multitemporal » (Serres and Latour, Conversations, 1995) readings of a technological and artistic heritage spanning the East and the West.
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ARTISTS
Morehshin Allahyari
Disnovation.org: Nicolas Maigret, Maria Roszkowska & Clément Renaud
Quayola
Evan Roth
Eduardo Kac
Laurent Mignonneau &
Christa Sommerer
VENUES
Galerie Charlot Paris, 2017
Galerie Charlot Tel Aviv, 2018