LONDON.- “The future is certain”, according to an old Soviet joke. “It’s the past which is unpredictable.” This exhibition reflects on the ways history is written and the inevitability with which the past reasserts itself in the future. Bringing together works from nine artists and collectives, The Future is Certain is an economy of ideas and artworks as well as historical facts and records that refuse to disappear on their own.

The past is a force that needs work – cultural, social, political, psychological – otherwise it tends to reaffirm itself in the future. History itself is the central subject of the show: It is a research material, a source of imagery, a producer of revolutions, wars, inventions, and prophecies, and an object for thought.

In the exhibition, Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevičius rewinds history with his iconic video work Once in the XX Century . Filmmaker Jonas Mekas discusses politics, his experiences, his dreams, and his past life as a bumblebee with curator and cultural attaché Justė Kostikovaitė and London artist Johnston Sheard in a conversation titled On Life . American artist Emily Newman’s The New Chelyuskinites brings us back to a 1933 Soviet expedition of experienced Arctic explorers and unseasoned enthusiasts traversing the Northern Maritime Route in a conventional ship instead of an icebreaker.

Lithuanian filmmaker Emilija Škarnulytė captures a mermaid in a decommissioned NATO base in Arctic Norway, while Canadian artist Felix Kalmenson in his multi-screen video installation Atlas brings into relief the shifting notions of futurity and history that have accompanied the transition from the Soviet period into the present era in Russia.

Slavs and Tatars joins in on the Russian joke of the exhibition’s title with their Горы от Ума ( Mountains of Wit ). Rather Than Happiness further explores the Caucasus, researches the ancient Khazar people, and reflects on three Abrahamic religious discourses: Christian, Muslim and Jewish. Belarusian artist Jura Shust reflects on the concept of a noosphere, the sphere of consciousness and human thought. Finally, Juan Pablo Villegas presents an actual mirror, made by the artist from the silver of analogue film slides which once depicted ancient archeological sites, titled Moneda , after the Goddess of memory.

Participating artists and collectives: Felix Kalmenson, Jonas Mekas (in video conversation with Johnston Sheard and Justė Kostikovaitė), Deimantas Narkevičius, Emily Newman, Rather Than Happiness, Jura Shust, Slavs and Tatars, Emilija Škarnulytė, Juan Pablo Villegas.

Felix Kalmenson is a Toronto-based artist, born in St Petersburg, with a practice in installation, video, photography, performance and sound art. His work is concerned with the mediation of histories and contemporary narratives by political, institutional and corporate bodies and how innovations in the field of communication serve to redefine publicness, sovereignty and power.

Jonas Mekas is a Lithuanian-American filmmaker, poet and artist who has often been called “the godfather of American avant-garde cinema”, drawing from his extreme life experiences throughout his long career. Along with his cinematic work including the award-winning The Brig (1963), Mekas founded Film Culture magazine, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and the Anthology Film Archives, paving the way for avant-garde 20th-century cinema.

Deimantas Narkevičius’ video artwork is inspired by his own past and the cultural memory of his country of Lithuania. Through this inspiration Narkevičius evokes memories of the tumultuous changes which came about with the fall of communism in Lithuania, using film and video to explore history from a current and subjective point of view.

Emily Newman was born in Singapore in 1977, was raised in the UK and is currently based between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and St Petersburg, Russia. Her latest works draw from her time spent in Russia and explore methods of attaining historical and self-knowledge through model-building and imaginative reconstruction.

Rather Than Happiness, founded by Goda Palekaitė (Lithuania) and Aaron Kahn (U.S.A.) is an artistic collaboration at the intersection of theatre, space and politics. Goda is an accomplished polymath with achievements in visual art, scenography, anthropology, writing and research while Aaron brings decades of experience from his pursuit of experimental, physical, and political theatre. Rather Than Happiness will present a piece deriving from their ethnographic, audio-visual and historical research voyage in the Khazar territories in the Caucasian Mountains of modern day Russia and Georgia.

Jura Shust was born in 1983 in Molodechno, Belarus. As a teenager, he organized the experimental musical group "Usplёsk", later "IOD". As a co-editor of the underground local art magazine, Shust studied media communications at the EHU (Vilnius, Lithuania). In 2016, Shust graduated from the highest art institute HISK (Ghent, Belgium). During the last 3 years he was actively exhibited in Belgium and other European countries. In 2016 Shust participated in the 5th Moscow Biennale for Young Art. Today his works are kept both in private and public collections in Belgium, including the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, S.M.A.K..

Emilija Škarnulytė is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Tromsø, Berlin and Vilnius. Her films look into the cross sections of invisible structures, deep time, geo-traumas, identity and geological ungrounding processes. Her films have been screened at the 15th International Venice Architecture Biennale (2016), SIART Bolivia International Art Biennial (2016) and the International Film Festival Rotterdam (Netherlands, 2015).

Slavs and Tatars is an art collective and faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. The collective’s practice is based on three activities: exhibitions, books and lecture-performances.

Juan Pablo Villegas sees filmmaking as a way to bring together his interest in images and sound. The tools he uses derive from audiovisual principles that allow reflection by changing the way they are conventionally used. In recent years, he has researched issues related to translation and the expansion of the sensory spectrum, the animist condition of objects, and the formation of the psychosomatic.