Anamnesis: The Tales of Unlived Pasts and Forgotten Futures |  Isil E Celik 

The cultural revolution induced by communication technologies took us, humankind, to the threshold of an ontological fracture changing the way we live, think, and become. Will we ever break free from our corporality and eject into an immaterial and perhaps immortal web of information? Or, will our hubristic desire of transcending the limits bring our existence to an end? Will human enhancement result in the complete mastery of not only the planet but also the universe? Or, are we merely a step in the evolution that might even transform into something somewhat inhuman, into something which is unimaginably different, into the Other. 

Our being is marked by the ability to multiply and increase our capacities. In the contemporary world which is signed by technical enhancements, our capacity of making and using tools has reached a complexity insomuch as the tools we created infuse radically into our being forcing us to re-think what it means to be human. 

Today, at the threshold of this uncertain existential transition, re-thinking human is not only philosophically but also politically and aesthetically significant. As things stand, art probes the boundaries of our thinking by unfolding new modes of creativity and inspires us to organize a life interwoven with high tech to change radically the social and the concrete structure of the planet. Art pushes new perspectives and opens up new dimensions. It records what can be hoped for and did not and will not necessarily be actualized actualised; creates virtual worlds.

Anamnesis: The Tales of Unlived Pasts and Forgotten Futures is a eulogy for the virtual aspects of our existence that take form in the peculiar memory of art to (re)invent the past and invite a yet unexpected future of the posthuman.  With this exhibition, we seek to gaze into the abyss of our posthuman condition through a cyclic understanding of time and by imagining the past and the future possibilities of human existence.