LONDON.- This summer, Selfridges will partner with Berlin’s Reference Festival to present SUPERFUTURES, an immersive exhibition which will bring together 13 experiential spectacles and surreal interventions by leading artists, brands and thinkers. Installed throughout Selfridges London, the exhibition will also be available to view digitally.
The SUPERFUTURES Exhibition will seek to explore and imagine tomorrow’s world – how might we live, what might we look like, how will we behave, and what might it feel like? The exhibition will present a vision of a hybrid future, serving as a generative portal between the world-as-is and world-yet-to-come. Staged within Selfridges’ retail environment – a familiar and safe space for many – the installations will be designed to disrupt, provoke and inspire, gently probing customers to consider, ‘if we continue the way we live today, where might this trajectory take us in the future?’
The show will be curated by Reference Festival with Agnes Gryczkowska (formerly Serpentine Galleries and Schinkel Pavillon) and will present a host of visions for the future, featuring work by Monira Al Qadiri, Katja Novitskova, Sevdaliza, Gentle Monster, Joey Holder, Ottolinger, Oliver Laric, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Nico Vascellari, Ignota Books, Jan Vorisek, William Darrell and a panel conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Highlights will include an installation of sculptures by Estonian artist Katja Novitskova, examining the relationship between technology, biology and ecology; Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s video work Liminal Lands, in which the Danish artist proposes a future where data and biology fluidly interconnect; and a specially commissioned display of five inflatable sculptures, which is paired with a selection of oil-drill-shaped Murano glass sculptures, by Monira Al Qadiri, a Kuwaiti visual artist born in Senegal and educated in Japan.
“SUPERFUTURES is a reaction to a moment in history. A moment in which the future and diversity of our planet is pulled into question. As socio-political shifts attempt to increase hierarchies and homogeneity, the exhibition suggests a future that is a hybrid – a rhizomatic queerness and a desiring machine.” – says Agnes Gryczkowska, Guest Curator
“The SUPERFUTURES exhibition will present past and future universes, full of mutation and cohabitation, blurring boundaries between the organic and crafted, between human and machine, and challenging existing outlooks and normative gestures into reshaping our future.” – says Mumi Haiati, Founder of Reference Studios and Reference Festival
“Through the SUPERFUTURES Exhibition, Selfridges continues on its journey of “reinventing retail“, this time in a more philosophical sense. We aim to challenge our own mindsets, along with those of our customers, thinking deeply about what sort of future we might want, and the steps we need to take today, in order to live in a brighter tomorrow. We are thrilled to be on this journey with Reference Festival and an incredible line-up of future-thinking collaborators.“ - says Emma Kidd, Selfridges Acting Creative Director.
