until 30.10.2023

curted by Daniel Birnbaum and Massimiliano Gioni

ACM
Thomas Bayrle
Emery Blagdon
Lee Bul
Maurizio Cattelan
Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg
Marcel Duchamp
Cao Fei
Urs Fischer
Fischli & Weiss
H.R. Giger
Brion Gysin
Camille Henrot
Judith Hopf
Jeff Koons
Mire Lee
Ulf Linde
Abu Bakarr Mansaray
James Tilly Matthews
Jakob Mohr
Vera Molnar
Henrik Olesen
Philippe Parreno
Seth Price
Wilhelm Reich
Pipilotti Rist
Pamela Rosenkranz
Mika Rottenberg
Sturtevant
Takis
Andro Wekua
Ulla Wiggen
Anicka Yi

Dream Machines, curated by Daniel Birnbaum and Massimiliano Gioni, is an exhibition that explores the impact of technology on human imagination. It presents a number of momentous works, from Ulf Linde’s reinterpretation of Marcel Duchamp’s Coffee Mill (1911), which was described by André Breton as an infernal machine, to a selection of recent experiments exploring the virtual realm. Installed in and around the cave-like space of the DESTE Slaughterhouse in Hydra, this boîte-en-valise of an exhibition becomes itself a “bachelor machine” (to use Duchamp’s term), its artworks caught in an endless mechanical ballet.

Combining loans from the Dakis Joannou Collection with newly commissioned works, the show features historical figures such as Duchamp and Wilhelm Reich, significant contemporary practitioners, highly celebrated artists such as Jeff Koons, Pipilotti Rist, and Pamela Rosenkranz, as well as a large number of self-taught outsiders.

Technology creates utopian dreams. It also creates paranoia. Taking its name from Brion Gysin’s legendary 1960s Dreamachine—an invention that in spite of its modesty was believed by many of its users like William S. Burroughs, Kurt Cobain, Allen Ginsberg, Brian Jones, and Paul McCartney, to revolutionize human consciousness—the show revisits moments of both anticipation and distress.

Artists have always embraced new media. And yet one cannot say that the art world’s dominant attitude towards modern technology has been one of sheer enthusiasm, even if the last century saw moments of techno-optimism, from Italian Futurism and Russian Constructivism to the 1960s movement E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology). Key voices of philosophy and critical theory, such as the Frankfurt School’s most somber representatives, including Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, established an attitude of techno-skepticism so fundamental that any form of playful affirmation, let alone enthusiasm, appeared at best naïve. The essence of technological reason, we were told, lies in hegemonic control and totalitarian exploitation of nature. Its distancing effects make it an enemy of more authentic forms of experience, like that of great art.
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DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art
Slaughterhouse, Hydra
Epar.Od. Mandrakiou-Molou
Idra 180 40
Greece

HOURS
Daily 11:00–13:00 & 19:00–22:00
Tuesday closed (exception: Tuesday, June 20)