Reference Unfinished History: slide tape, MCA Chicago 1999 Unfinished History was organized by the Walker Art Center. It was shown in Chicago, January - April 1999. Doug Aitken James Angus Alighiero Boetti Andrea Bowers Maurizio Cattelan Thomas Hirschhorn Mats Hjelm Huang Yong-Ping William Kentridge Bodys Isek Kingelez Koo Jeong-a Shirin Neshat Cady Noland Nox (Lars Spuybroek) Gabriel Orozco Pan Sonic (Mika Vainio & Ilpo Väisänen) Thomas Schütte SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa & Associates) Roman Signer Yutaka Sone Alexandr Sokurov Thomas Struth Wing Young Huie The millennium is almost upon us. Preparations are under way for celebrations around the world. Hotel reservations have been made and flights booked. Stadiums are being built to house the biggest birthday the world has ever shared. However, do we really understand the century we are leaving? The exhibition Unfinished History looks at work by 23 international artists who are grappling with the ambiguities of the century we still inhabit. When the Berlin Wall came crashing down in 1989, the notion of globalism hinted at an idealized, post-Cold War harmony. But when the brick dust cleared, the world was on fire again with the eruption of long-dormant ethnic and national antagonisms. The optimism quickly faded as the foretold future and the 'unfinished history' of the past collided. Guest-curated by independent curator-critic Francesco Bonami, in association with Walker Assistant Curator Douglas Fogle, Unfinished History reflects the increasing globalization of cultural production. Bringing together work by an international group of contemporary artists in architecture, film, electronic music, photography, sculpture, installation, and video, the exhibition reflects the multiplicity of artistic approaches to the problems we confront in a world of increasingly fluid borders. Here, the past, present, and future collapse into a set of contradictory, sometimes unsolvable issues. The shifting geographic borders of our world play a central role in the exhibition, where mapping appears as a function of both nationalist and corporate imperatives. The late Alighiero Boetti's last tapestry, Mappa (1992-1993), for example, reflects the changing geopolitical realities at the end of the Cold War as visualized by Pakistani weavers, while Alexandr Sokurov's elegiac film Spiritual Voices (1995) takes us to the border of Russia and Tajikistan to document the existential plight of Russian soldiers charged with guarding the border after the Soviet Union's fall. The tragic consequences of history itself come to mind in the compelling sculptural meditations of Thomas Schütte and in William Kentridge's animated charcoal drawings, which reflect the complexity of apartheid as seen by a white South African. The history of urban politics meets the present in Mats Hjelm's video installation White Flight (1997), which combines his father's documentary footage of the Detroit riots during the Black Power Movement in the 1960s with the artist's own return to that city 30 years later. Wing Young Huie investigates an increasingly global urban culture of Minneapolis itself in his photographic installation Lake Street (1998). But it is the weight of our unfinished history that pulls on the legs of Maurizio Cattelan's sculpture of a taxidermic horse, Novecento (1997), and points to the complexity of our relationship with a history that is unfinished. Gabriel Orozco's installation Kitchen Door Maze (1997) transforms the present into a labyrinth that leaves us wandering in a realm of possibilities and directions, suggesting that there is not one path out of this century, but many. (October 1998 Calendar)
	Archive Details Format: VHS Generation: dub Length: Accession Number: 99.v0315 Director: MCA Chicago Executive producer: MCA Chicago Production company: MCA Chicago Type: Video Copyright: 1999 MCA Chicago Credit Line: Walker Art Center Archives: Sound and Moving Image Collections