The Brave New World Ltd. exhibition project at DOX is based on a comparison of social models as described by Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and Ray Bradbury in their famous dystopic visions of the future, with the current social situation, especially the area of social control, consumerism, and the media.
The primary aim of the authors of the books Brave New World (1932), 1984 (1949) and 451° Fahrenheit (1953) was to galvanize readers and point out possible future threats. Orwell’s model of controlling the population, based on psychological manipulation, fear, and a total absence of privacy, presciently predicted the perfection of monitoring systems, cameras, or chips with biometric information.
In the 1930s, Aldous Huxley saw a fundamental threat in technological interventions leading to a controlled splitting of society into castes and as early as the 1950s, Ray Bradbury had predicted the victory of superficial mass-media culture over a society that valued books.
The exhibition Brave New World Ltd., will show where their predictions were wrong, and where current reality has exceeded their dark visions many times over. The work of contemporary artists working regularly with subject matter related to social monitoring, the consumer society, and the media world has the same warning message, but alas refers to a future that has already arrived.
BRAVE NEW WORLD
11.09.2015 – 25.01.2016
Daisuke Takakura, Monodramatic Crowd, 2012. Courtesy of Daisuke Takakura
Zarko Baseski, Ordinary Man, 2009
Reynold Reynolds & Patrick Jolley, Burn, 2002. Video still. Courtesy of Reynold Reynolds & Patrick Jolley
Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Stranger Visons, 2012 – 2013
Discover: www.dox.cz
