Memory Is The Future in Reverse
Ein Gespräch zwischen Johan Grimonprez und dem Autor Tom McCarthy.
Moderiert von Matthias Bruhn.

Di, 18.11.2025, 18:00 Uhr
LH 8+9, 1. OG, Useum Eintritt frei

Die Zusammenarbeit zwischen dem Künstler und Filmemacher Johan Grimonprez und dem Schriftsteller Tom McCarthy – insbesondere beim Film »Double Take« (2009) und dem Kurzfilm »From Satin Island« (2015) – ist eine faszinierende Mischung aus literarischem Experiment und visueller Kunst. Ob durch das filmische Déjà-vu, in dem Alfred Hitchcock seinem Doppelgänger begegnet, oder durch eine poetische, abstrakte Reflexion über Katastrophe und Identität – die beiden schaffen vielschichtige Werke, die sich mit Themen wie Verdopplung, unserer heutigen dystopischen Medienlandschaft, existenzieller Zufälligkeit und den traumatischen Untiefen des modernen Lebens auseinandersetzen.

In ihrem Gespräch werden Johan Grimonprez und Tom McCathy spannende Verbindungen zwischen ihren aktuellen Arbeitsgebieten herstellen und einen tiefgehenden Dialog führen, der von griechischen Tragödien zu moderner Werbung, von Hitchcock zu Freud springt und anhand von Archivfilmen als Störungen unserer kollektiven Vorstellung so schwierige Fragen aufwirft wie: Wer schreibt Geschichte? Kann Erinnerung vorausschauend sein? Ist Erinnerung tatsächlich die Zukunft in umgekehrter Reihenfolge oder ist Vorstellungskraft die Vergangenheit im Schnellvorlauf?

Die Veranstaltung wird von Matthias Bruhn, Professor für Kunstwissenschaft und Medientheorie an der Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe (HfG), moderiert.

Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theatre and radio. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. His first novel, Remainder, won the 2008 Believer Book Award; his third, C, was a 2010 Booker Prize finalist, as was his fourth, Satin Island, in 2015. He is also author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and of the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. His latest novel, The Making of Incarnation, was published in 2021.

McCarthy has held Visiting Professorships at the Royal College of Art London, Columbia University New York and Städelschule Frankfurt. Since 2022 he has held the position of Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute New Mexico. In 2019 he guest-curated the exhibition ‘Empty House of the Stare’ at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, and in 2022 a major exhibition, ‘Holding Pattern’, in Kunstnernes Hus Oslo, responding to the art institute’s invitation to explore the themes and motifs of his work. Born in Scotland, he is now a Swedish citizen, and lives in Berlin.

Who owns our imagination in a world of existential vertigo where truth has become a shipwrecked refugee? Is it the storyteller who can contain contradictions, who can slip between the languages we have been given to become a time-traveler of the imagination? Johan Grimonprez’s critically acclaimed work dances on the borders of theory and practice, between art and cinema, beyond the dualisms of documentary and fiction, other and self, mind and brain to weave new pathways and stories, emphasizing a multiplicity of realities. Informed by an archeology of present-day media, his work depicts intimate stories that brush up against the bigger picture of globalization. It questions our collective imagination and the contemporary sublime, one framed by a fear industry that has infected political and social dialogue.

Grimonprez’s curatorial projects have been exhibited at museums worldwide, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; and MoMA. His works are in the collections of Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; and Tate Modern, London. His artwork is represented by the Sean Kelly Gallery (New York).

He lectured widely, among others at the University de Saint-Denis (Paris 8), Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics; Tate Modern; MoMA (New York); Columbia University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); the Parliament of Bodies of Documenta 14, and he participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and currently lectures at School of Art HOGENT/KASK , Ghent.

More info via: https://johangrimonprez.be/main/home.html