Preview: Metahaven: VERSION HISTORY

The Institute of Contemporary Arts is pleased to present VERSION HISTORY, an expansive exhibition of new and recent work by Metahaven. 

Metahaven (Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden) are Netherlands-based artists, filmmakers and designers. Since 2007, they have forged an experimental and speculative approach to design that encompasses visual identities, spatial installations, publications, textiles and music videos.  

Using design as a form of investigation, Metahaven have addressed the interoperations of information networks, platform infrastructure and political geographies. They have developed projects around digital and physical enclaves like the Principality of Sealand and WikiLeaks, and their speculative analyses have anticipated the conditions now labelled ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news.’ Using a maximalist visual approach, Metahaven collapse the aesthetic and analytic, combining expressive graphic and textual layers with poetic and cinematic elements.  

Since 2015, Metahaven have focused on moving-image work between the realms of film and digital media. Presented in exhibitions, online and at film festivals, their films use a mixture of live-action, animation and archival footage, which generate a highly seductive, hybridised form between fiction and documentary. 

VERSION HISTORY centres on a new and ambitious moving-image work titled Eurasia (Questions on Happiness) (2018), co-commissioned and produced by the ICA. Installed on a large-scale video wall, this work combines aspects of science fiction, essay, poem and folk tale. Shot in the Southeastern Urals and in Macedonia, Eurasia examines political and cultural narratives wherein belief and emotions hold sway over objective notions of reality. Creating a layered immersion within these conditions, this film explores neo-medieval interface politics, incompatible timescales and reversals of linear duration.  

Accompanying Eurasia are key films made by Metahaven over the past two years such as Information Skies (2016) and Hometown (2018), which defy the simple diagnosis of contemporary conditions that the artists describe as ‘existence in the thick of physical and digital layers.’