#SaveTheDate Berlin – 03.02. – 26.02.2023! Embedded in the glass architecture of the Schinkel Pavillon, the latest video work by the New York collective DIS imagines scenarios of existence that are far removed from the familiar strategies of linear historiography and knowledge production. The cross-genre science fiction documentary Everything but the World focuses on what is probably the most remote species inhabiting planet Earth today: humans.
Rise and fall lie close together in the fossil record of human history. Everything But The World questions post-Enlightenment notions of „progress“ by connecting the repetitive movements of today’s warehouse workers to the prehistoric ways of life practised by our ancestors as they transitioned from hunting and gathering to farming full-time.
Between the speculative future and the recorded past, numerous protagonists guide us through the narrative, successively blurring the line between reality and fiction in a flood of images that make use of changing forms and formats – from the classic documentary to the YouTube tutorial to the TV show, from the widescreen to the vertical smartphone format. Interested in the human fascination with the dystopian end of time, the film traces – regardless of absolute truths and conventions – the frontiers of possibility.
It may be difficult to grasp from the perspective of our scarce lifetimes, but history is not a narrative of evolutions and constants, but of changes and revolutions. If we understand that our world is only one possibility among many, what worlds might await us after the end of the world as we know it?
DIS is a collaborative project by Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso and David Toro. Based in New York, the collective work both artistically and curatorially across a broad range of media and platforms that utilize methods of producing, utilizing, and distributing content online. In 2010, they initially founded the online magazine DIS Magazine. This was later followed by an image database (DISimages) and an online store (DISown) with products and accessories designed by artists. In 2018, the magazine was replaced by the streaming platform dis.art.
From the beginning, DIS has realized artistic projects alongside the magazine and acted on other platforms, such as exhibitions at MoMA and the New Museum in New York. In 2016, the collective curated the Berlin Biennale; most recently, they co-curated the Biennale de l‘Image en Mouvement 2021 there with Andrea Bellini, director of the Centre d‘Art Contemporain Genève.
Curated by Klara Hülskamp & Lina Louisa Krämer
