Ex-Ante

Utilising observation, forensic, and analytical strategies, the work of six artists offer cinematic approaches to capturing community-based realities. Through their exhibition, and a series of reading groups and events, ‘Ex-ante’ is interested in tying stories and storytelling from the Canadian North, Northern Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, and Aotearoa.
Publicly asking how these works negotiate conflicts of nature, law, politics, and materials, this exhibition suggests that inabilities to respond to and to produce ‘truth’ belong also to the domain of image-making.
New regimes of images find their way into our courtrooms, at first adding an unusual break into the perceived truth of law. The image’s performative tactic can give form to the identity of stories from communities that might otherwise not surface into public knowledge. Stripped of its observational power, the image loses clear connection to a single reality.
These are some of the attitudes employed to signal a shifting need for the undermining of the historical event, its claim to the truth, and the position from which it is told. How is the image and imagination involved in this? Can we speak before our turn? How to offer a reality before the event?
‘Ex-ante’ focuses on the role of images in our world, arguing that we need not speak to truth —either ‘post’ or ‘pre’—nor the image perform it. Instead, the exhibition advocates for the imaginative and speculative role of the image when it is set to work on the present. It tries to understand how we might be complicit in the production of our own realities, truths, or futures. How not to forecast, but to see, before the event?