Chronus Art Center (hereafter referred to as CAC) is pleased to announce our special New Year Project collaborated with MOMENTUM Berlin, the showing of a special programme of video works originally screened at the 1st Kiev Biennale in 2012. Curated by the Artistic Director of the Biennale, David Elliott, the programme features new works by John Bock, Yang Fudong, Gulsun Karamustafa, Lutz Becker, Tracey Moffatt, Map Office, and Miao Xiaochun.

Echoing the first words of A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Charles Dickens’ famous novel set at the time of the French Revolution, this exhibition jumps forward to the present to consider how contemporary art and aesthetics use the past to express the future. The ideals of Human Rights developed during 18th Century European Enlightenment found their first political expression in the American and French Revolutions. Yet, in spite of fine intentions at the outset, Human Rights have been constricted as each revolution has contained at its core the worst as well as the best of human thought and action.

This exhibition reflects on utopian dreams of freedom, equality, and security that are very much at the heart of our lives today, as well as on their opposite: terror, inequity and war. It is the destructive forces of both man and nature that seem to make a more ideal life impossible.

In 2013, the exhibition was showed at MOMENTUM Berlin and SKY SCREEN initiative for video art in public space in Istanbul and Berlin.

-Chronus Art Center

Image: © Yang Fu Dong
YeJiang/The Nightman Cometh
2011