Tina Helen

HAPPY NEW YEAR, DEAR

EXHIBITION, PUBLICATION AND SYMPOSIUM AT BUREAU PUBLIK, 2013

The economic crisis has challenged the belief in the future. In an attempt to revitalize the confidence in the future investments are made in the field of knowledge. Education is not only supposed to change the unemployment statistics, but should also create new markets in the future. Using the Italian critic and media activist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s concept of the year 1977 as a turning point in the understanding of the future, as thematic point of departure, Happy New Year, Dear sets out to discuss learning, education and art in a post-futuristic perspective. If education is an investment in the future, what characterizes learning in a time defined as ‘after the future’? How does the lacking ability to imagine the future affect our relation to learning? What reality are we bracing ourselves and coming generations for? Why teach at all? Why learn?

The exhibition Happy New Year, Dear presented a series of photographs and a publication. The photographs investigate different specific historical events from the perspective of 1977 as turning point. The publication compiles material derived from a symposium held at bureau publik. The symposium was staged as a New Year’s Party leading up to the year 1977, inviting a broad spectrum of international and national cultural producers to write and perform New Year’s Speeches during the evening. By collecting these speeches the publication for Happy New Year, Dear attempts to tune in on the idea of turning points and the field in between art and knowledge production. The contributors of the publication is Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Camel Collective, Sidsel Nelund, Syd Mead, No·w·here, Carsten Juhl, Syvende & Sidst, Uffe Elbæk, Jürgen Bock, openhagen, Lars Bang Larsen, Bitbureauet, Jakob Jakobsen, Learning Site and Jakob Mølgaard.