TURIN.- Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo presents Unemployment, the first solo exhibition in Italy of Josh Kline (USA 1979). Through sculpture, video and installation, Kline explores the political and social transformations of our age, presenting a critical look at the impact of technology and the “new economy” on the lives of individuals in the 21st century. The US society is taken as a negative paradigm of processes which are affecting all advanced countries, and which take the form of a growing threat to the privacy of individuals, their freedom of expression, and their economic status. In the best tradition of literary and film sci-fi, Kline shares his dire outlook on a world on the verge of collapse, in which the interests of a few people shape the lives and living conditions of the many.

Unemployment is the latest chapter in a cycle of exhibitions that speculate on nascent political, economic, and cultural issues that are likely to define the forthcoming decades. Adopting a narrative approach, they develop several themes and move chronologically from the observation of the present to a prediction about the future. Kline’s previous project Freedom (2015-2016), the beginning of the cycle, centered on the possibility of political action, the potential of political speech, and the fate of democracy itself in societies where the social commons has been privatized. The installation was inspired by Zuccotti Park, made famous by the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. It showed threatening Teletubbies in police riot gear, equipped with monitors built into their bellies, featuring videos in which the words and identities of political activists on social media were transposed onto retired policemen. Another central work, created using face-substitution software featured an uncanny version of President Obama delivering a fictional and uplifting inaugural speech in 2009 – presenting a vision of the transformative progressive presidency that might have been. In each successive exhibition in the cycle—of which Unemployment is the second—Kline will look at a possible moment in the future and the set of developing issues which are likely to define its politics.

Unemployment jumps forward to the 2030s, more than two decades after the 2008 financial crisis. Here Kline builds a hypothetical, disturbing scenario, imagining the devastating effects of a new economic crisis, which strikes what remains of a middle class that has lost its jobs as a consequence of massive automation in productive activities and services. Unemployment will become an ever bigger issue, and will eventually affect professional and specialized jobs as well, leading to economic, social and personal upheaval. In Unemployment, Kline asks questions about what will happen to the hundreds of millions of middle-class professionals in the western society, in a world where they may never work again. Stuck in poverty, discarded by a system that no longer needs the help of humans in order to function, individuals could end up like waste to be disposed of, nothing but abandoned, empty shells devoid of any use value. The works explore the fate of the human being and the human condition in this all-too-possible future. Kline’s narration takes the form of sculptures, audio and video works, and installation elements that help create an immersive, dreamlike experience, like a film in the fourth dimension which disturbs the viewers for its verisimilitude and the recognizability of compositional elements, which are part of a shared imagination, of an everyday urban and media environment. Many of the works are created using advanced technology, including 3D printing and graphic software, as if he wanted to give a tangible example of, and a physical substance to, the automation processes that lead to the disastrous scenarios he anticipates.

Josh Kline was born in Philadelphia in 1979. He lives in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Freedom, Portland Art Museum, 2016 and Modern Art Oxford, 2015; Unemployment, 47 Canal, New York, 2016; Quality of Life, 47 Canal, New York, 2013. His work has been included in several group exhibitions, among them recently the 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2016; Life Itself, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2016; Suspended Animation, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., 2016; America Is Hard to See, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2015; 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience, New Museum, New York, 2015; Infinite Jest, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2014; Archeo, High Line, New York, 2014; Speculations on Anonymous Materials, Fridericianum, Kassel, 2013.

Along with Josh Kline's solo exhibition, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo presents a new installation of Parallel I-IV, the last completed work by the artist and filmaker Harun Farocki (1944-2014). “I am researching these strange new images which are somehow on the verge of competing with and defeating finally the cinematic-photographic image. The era of reproduction seems to be over, and the era of construction of a new world seems to be somehow on the horizon, or not on the horizon, it is already here.” With these words Farocki describes the series of 4 pieces entitled Parallel, a reflection on the status of the image in the digital age, a rigorous structural analysis of the processes through which reality is visually constructed, made possible by computer animation tools.

Farocki has worked as a film director since the 1960s, and for the past 5 decades he has been one of the keenest observers of the political and social trends of his time, which he analyzes through the technological and linguistic developments of the moving image. A social scientist, artist-archaeologist, media theorist and political activist –these labels, which have been attached to him, give us an idea of the complexity and relevance of an author who has experimented with different genres and contexts, from documentary to film essay to video installation, from art cinema to television and the art and museum system. What remains the same across all of these different forms is his use of images in a critical, analytical perspective. This reflective attitude coexists with practice, and acts upon it as a propulsive force. The connivance of visual representation with certain forms of exploitation, from the surveillance industry to military violence, is a preferred subject of inquiry for Farocki who, in the words of philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman, has explored the modes in which “the production of images contributes to the destruction of the human being”. Parallel I-IV, 2012-2014 focuses its attention on the evolution of digital animation as applied to videogames. In the different chapters of this work, which coexist in the exhibiting space within a multi-channel immersive installation, Farocki carries out a stylistic analysis that begins with the earliest stages of this application, when graphic solutions were extremely rough and simplistic, and ends with the photo-realism of today’s programs. However, although they tend to become increasingly realistic and even naturalistic, these images are characterized by a lack of indexical relatedness to reality, unlike what happened with the film and photographic medium. It is no longer about recording and reproducing physical traces of reality, or documenting it objectively - it is about building realities from nothing, worlds that have their own structures and functioning rules, other than those of the outside world. As the narrator’s voice in Parallel I recites, “in films there is the wind that blows and the wind that is produced by a wind machine. Computer images do not have two kinds of wind”. No longer representations but ideal-typical models, these images will redefine and subvert our relationship with reality. Or maybe they already have.

Ed Atkins's exhibition, organized in collaboration with Castello di Rivoli Museo di Arte Contemporanea, continues along with Josh Kline and Harun Farocki's exhibitions.