19 June – 9 July 2023
CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium
Corso Buenos Aires 42 11, Lavagna / IT
Exhibition view, CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium, Lavagna 2023. Photo: Tepes Montini
“Wearable high-tech, augmented reality, cybernetic prostheses, microchip implants, are the first steps of the transhumanism that herds human beings like cattle toward an alleged human-machine singularity. Does the human being desires to be free from the natural body’s caducity? What is the meaning of preserving the individual’s intellect in cyberspace? Which perspectives would immortality offer? Wouldn’t be more desirable to train our natural body and our innate potentialities relying on the resources and rebirth capability offered by nature?
The group art exhibition curated by Abramo Tepes Montini features digital and traditional painting, photography, graphics and video artworks by Iryna Calinicenco, Bobby Kim Ling Chen, Andrew Cheung, Martin Del Carpio, Elina, Ian Haig, Magdalena Hejzlarová, Erika Kassnel-Henneberg, Lucien.Art, Jeremy Pellington, Nina Sumarac, Shaharee Vyaas and Andrzej Wojciechowski.
In the previous group exhibition, entitled Escapism, we addressed the issue about the always more penetrating and totalitarian oppression and control exerted on the individual by the political and governmental system, which implements the old method of “carrot and stick” to forcedly push the masses. If the “stick” is oppression, TransHumance wants to investigate one of the brand new “carrots” that today the system of power tries to feed to peoples: the trivial benefits of a transition toward the digitalisation and the artificial sophistication of the person, as a prodrome of transhumanism, leading to epochal anthropological implications and prime philosophic and ethical dilemmas.
The transhumanism would be an ideology that, starting from the union between man and the robotic and/or computer machine into the so-called “singularity”, would shift mankind toward another phase, a goal: the post-humanism, that is an era where the natural human being will be outdated, extinct, evolved into something that will not be human any more, since the prefix post- itself always specify the end of an era, in this case of the human being.” Text: Tepes Montini
