FORGETTING THE FUTURE, ENVISAGING THE PAST “The future was on the side of the revolution. It was a great and empowering myth, but few believe it any longer: the future is over.” says Berardi. ‚End of the future‘ theories are not new, nor are the concepts that surround them. This is only one of countless theoretical arguments in support of the ‚end of the future‘ concept. How can we imagine the future without the suppression of corporate capitalism? Is there a way to detach our imagination from its world order? All of this is probably attainable by altering our relation to the past, present and future, or in general changing our perception on time’s linearity. As a result, plenty of questions might be raised. Can we imagine futures in the past? How can we forget the future, how can we envisage the past? Utopian futures are also loaded with the narratives of time while functioning as a platform of rethinking inequalities of the present time through fictional places and stories. Jameson writes broadly on the ideological aspect of the utopias and mentions “utopias are non-fictional, even though they are non-existent. Utopias in fact come to us as barely audible messages from a future that may never come into being.2 ” Through these ideas we can think of ways of imagining the possibilities of the future through the present and the past. The ideas emerged from the exhibition Asynchronicity of Now. Retracing the past, with works by Anneliese Greve, Yunsun Kim, Pharaz Azimi and Nina Plášková, would allow us to think beyond the conventional understanding of time. This alternative perception is not distinguished by the notion of time that characterises contemporary capitalism, or by the mechanical imagination of time. Instead, they approach the concrete and counteract the alienation that we experience in our own present time through an archaeological approach. In some ways, these artistic practices that we encounter in this exhibition might be ruins from the future, or everyday objects emerge from a lost time. Through the active and constant research processes of artists and the works as a part of this exhibition challenge the idea of linear stream of time. It‘s as if they are creating objects that don‘t exist in linear time. Text: Dr. Ayşe Güngör