Emma Kay

Chisenhale Gallery, London
Through April 1

The Future From Memory, the latest offering from Emma Kay—the English conceptual artist, who utilizes words and memories as the principle tools of her art—continues, and conceptually perfects, the concept she first started to explore in The World From Memory, a series of maps of the world drawn from memory. The series included The Bible From Memory, a text of 7,000 words taken from the Bible; Shakespeare From Memory, an attempt to reproduce every work ever written by this most famous of English bards, relying only on memory; and Worldview, a completely made-up 80,000 word story, which describes the history of the world from the Big Bang to the dawn of the twenty-first century.

More ambitious than all her previous works, The Future From Memory is an animated digital text which is intermittently projected, without beginning or end, onto a wall in the semi-dark of the gallery space. Onto a white background, fragments of blue text appear at the bottom of the screen and scroll back, like the text in the opening sequence of Star Wars towards an imaginary vanishing point. The sentences appear and disappear at varying speeds: at times they move so slowly they almost stay still; at others they run by so quickly that there isn’t enough time to read them completely, nor to reflect on what they say.

The sentences express the artist’s thoughts on an imaginary future and deal with a variety of themes—ranging from science to religion, economics to sex, cinema to politics—which examine every cultural sphere. The text follows no chronological order and takes the form of a historical document that was written at some point even further in the future than the time in question. Although Kay’s prophetic statements are inevitably arbitrary, the work is presented as though it was a scientific report predicting a less than rosy future.

And so visitors, as they sit on the concrete bench in front of the screen, don’t feel completely at ease, finding themselves facing anxieties and worries about the future, which seem to acquire substantiation through these events presented as though they had already taken place.




Chiara Zampetti
Translation by Rosalind Furness