The prevailing conditions of contemporary financialised neo-liberalism have limited our collective navigation towards a future, what was once the assumed function of the avant-garde modernist artist has been lost, forgotten or occluded in the ferment of recent theorisaton. This important task of thinking a future needs new forms to orient away from recent practical and theoretical cul de sacs. Conceived as an exhibition examining these logics of orientation, Who Thinks the Future? utilises the methodological tool of synthetic thinking, as developed by Peer Sessions, to combine multiple ideas into complex wholes. Produced from a series of workshops, discussions and group readings, this exhibition proposes a discursive, collective practice that maintains complexity rather than flattening it in consensus, as a tool to produce common futures that can imagine forward again. This practice could be adopted to connect and represent positions across a spectrum, enabling an ecology of ideas to be engendered and enacted, and to rethink the role of the artist in social transformation.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/10765