installation

On the background designed by Mark Fridvalszki is a series of semicircles, duplicated and composed in a way that evokes a portal connecting us to another reality. Through this part of the installation, rather than inviting viewers to cross over to the other side, the artist brings alien beings into our world. The shape and colour of the oval, totem-like forms standing next to the ‘portal’ refer to the Cold War modernism popularized in the 1950s and 60s. This style encapsulated the aesthetics of a time when space exploration took place in tandem with intensive research into psychedelic substances. In the world of post-war prosperity, extraterrestrial expeditions were accompanied by escapades into the depths of the human psyche, charting a wide horizon of possibilities that we dreamed of at the time.
What about the future we design today – what does it look like? Do retrofuturistic concepts from the last century and subtle modernist forms correspond to how you imagine what is yet to come?

Mark Fridvalszki (born 1981) studied at the Academies of Fine Arts in Vienna and Leipzig, obtaining a postgraduate degree from the latter in 2017. His works are like archaeological excavations carried out on the fertile ground of post-1950 Europe, covering subjects that range from futuristic Cold War modernity to the digital aesthetics of the late 1990s. With the concept of ‘modernism for the masses’ as their starting point, Fridvalszki’s works take on the form of ‘haunted’ visual essays, in which the future is mixed with the (deceptively similar) past, and everything is bathed in historically loaded nostalgia. Fridvalszki is also the initiator and one of the editors of Technologie und das Unheimliche (T+U), a thriving publishing project, present on the Central European art scene since 2014. He lives and works in Berlin.