CLEAR HISTORY
CORNELIA BALTES, RY DAVID BRADLEY, FRANK BRECHTER, TAMMI CAMPBELL, SALOMÉ CHATRIOT, MAJA DJORDJEVIC, OLI EPP, MATTHEW HANSEL, CHRISTOPHER HARTMANN, ALISON JACKSON, SALLY KINDBERG, CARY KWOK, SIMON LINKE, HARRISON PEARCE, ALLY ROSENBERG, DEVAN SHIMOYAMA, BEN SPIERS, MARIUS STEIGER, LIAO WENGROUP SHOW
Curated by Oli EPP
The term “Clear History” is part of a broader lexicon of web vernacular and evokes our daily digital rituals. Terms like “The Cloud”, “Hot Spot”, “Portal”, and “Window” conjure visions of ethereal lightness and technological transcendence. These words promise transparency and transformation, even as they mask the weight of their physical infrastructure. “Clear” becomes both verb and adjective – suggesting obstruction and transparency, deletion, and visibility.
Yet history resists such ethereal treatment – it's messy, woven with contradictions and half-truths that refuse to be cleared with a simple click. In an era where technology promises to edit, revise, and reinvent our past into something as thin as a screen, these artworks reveal what lies beneath our attempts at erasure. They record, reinvent, and freeze moments with one eye on the past and another squinting toward an uncertain future.
Intimately versed in both the effervescent and constraining dynamics of the contemporary art world, Epp composed a show that balances conceptual fluidity with formal rigor. The result is an environment where physicality reasserts itself – dripping, popping, crunching, and fogging up our glasses – while subtly addressing the immaterial currents that shape our contemporary experience.
The artists in Clear History speak to each other across mediums and methodologies, their works creating a constellation of responses to our contemporary condition. Like the web vernacular that inspired its title, the exhibition plays with the meaning of transparency and opacity. These works assert their stubborn materiality – they drip, shine, stretch, and transform. Like history itself, they refuse the easy promises of our digital lexicon. Inside every cloud, portal, and window lies a physical world deeply imbricated into our senses. As we resign ourselves to the hallucination, we find ourselves adapting to – even appreciating – the simulation. Yet these works remind us that there is no true separation between virtual and material existence, only an endless cycle of cleaning and marking, where touch and sight, presence and absence, become indistinguishable from one another.
Text by Anitra Lourie, researcher at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
