MECHELEN.- The sunsets were purple and red and yellow and on fire examines how people and communities grapple with the void left behind by futures long lost. Loaded with cultural references spanning multiple temporal and spatial geographies, the works on show explore the collision of personal and collective memories, and ways in which they continue to haunt the present—obstructing our ability to look forward.

Amid hypernormalisation (1), fake news, polarisation, brainrot, state violence, live-streamed atrocities, and the overall devastating realities of our current era, we find ourselves lured into the quicksand of nostalgia—a “desire to live in a future to a past that history sliced off, leaving its scar.” (2) This pull toward the past takes the form of phantom nostalgia: a desire for something never experienced, or that existed only as a promise, yet which continues to exert a powerful hold on the present. Entangled with hauntology—the persistence of futures that never came to be—this condition produces a pervasive sense of dissociation and alienation. (3) The works on show give shape to this disorientation through fractured and feverish dreamscapes unfolding across moving image, storytelling and music. Often staged against urban ruins—a symbol to societal collapse—the artists’ protagonists turn to subcultures, pre-colonial realities, orally transmitted anecdotes and urban legends in search of sense amidst senselessness. Time no longer moves forward in a straight line, but stutters, returns, and loops into itself in a perpetual cycle. Within these repetitions, the ghosts that linger are not merely residues of loss, but potential portals—spectral openings through which we might learn, recalibrate, and imagine otherwise.

Team Kunsthal Mechelen: Sarina Bongaerts, Jessica Meuleman, Anne Van de Voorde, Lien Van Gils, Lars Van Vlasselaer, Nacho Vargas, Stephen Verstraete and coordinator Steven Op de Beeck

What were the skies like when you were young?
They went on forever. When we lived in Arizona, the skies always had little fluffy clouds—long and clear, moving slowly. At night there were stars everywhere.
And when it rained, everything turned beautiful. The sunsets were purple and red and yellow and on fire, and the clouds would catch the colors.
That’s neat, cause I used to look at them all the time when I was little.
You don’t see that.

—“Little fluffy clouds”, The Orb (1990)

With works by Charbel Alkhoury, Klein, Zein Majali, Alison Nguyen, Valentin Noujaïm, Tanat Teeradakorn and Jacob Schoolmeesters. Curated by Evelyn Simons.

(1) Alexei Yurchak; Adam Curtis.
(2) McKenzie Wark, Raving (2023).
(3) Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx (1993); Mark Fischer, Ghosts of My Life (2014); Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019).