Alex Verhaest: The Archive of Unattained Futures

Barakat Contemporary is proud to present The Archive of Unattained Futures, the solo exhibition of Alex Verhaest (b.1985, Belgium) from June 8th to July 31st, 2022 at the Barakat Seoul location. It is Verhaest’s first solo exhibition in Korea and Asia at large, after her two-person exhibition in the same location in 2017.

The Archive of Unattained Futures displays ambitious new works developed by the artist for the past three years: The Archivist (2022), a 60-channel interactive video installation in which archival images from various public domains are transformed and composited, and Ad Hominem (2022), a video game, which philosophically interrogates utopian thinking. The script for both works is written by Verhaest in collaboration with GPT-3, an AI, which produces human-like text from deep learning. The works together elaborate a ludic cinematic space, an interactive science fiction film. Interweaving the multilayered epic is Change, the protagonist of the story, and the four utopias centered around either collective or individual protagonists with either progressive or conservative ideologies based on scholar Sofie Verreast's Eutopia Unbound.