VERSION HISTORY is the first solo exhibition in a major UK institution by artists, filmmakers and designers Metahaven, featuring an expansive new moving-image commission as part of an overview of their hybrid investigations into overlapping geopolitical, technological, and emotional conditions.

VERSION HISTORY centres on three moving-image works: the newly commissioned feature-length Eurasia (Questions on Happiness) (2018), Hometown (2018) and Information Skies (2016). These films share a vibrant aesthetic language that combines cinematic imagery with graphic, animated layers and immersive soundscapes. They are presented within distinctive installations at the ICA, including a series of murals threaded through the institute’s galleries, and a hand-tufted carpet. The dual meanings summoned by the exhibition title – both different versions of history and reality, and an interface through which these versions are rendered – are at the heart of the three works.

Metahaven’s films deploy what they describe as ‘truth futurism’ – a mode of speculation on an altered cognitive order, in which the lack of accountability of the ‘post-truth’ era has become emotionally processed. Building on the movement in the collective’s practice between analytic reporting and affective experience, VERSION HISTORY revolves around a state of epistemic uncertainty, spinning off political and cultural narratives where belief and self-deception are in competition with empirical reality.

The exhibition will run between 3rd October 2018 and 13th January 2019.
VERSION HISTORY is the first solo exhibition in a major UK institution by artists, filmmakers and designers Metahaven, featuring an expansive new moving-image commission as part of an overview of their hybrid investigations into overlapping geopolitical, technological, and emotional conditions.

VERSION HISTORY centres on three moving-image works: the newly commissioned feature-length Eurasia (Questions on Happiness) (2018), Hometown (2018) and Information Skies (2016). These films share a vibrant aesthetic language that combines cinematic imagery with graphic, animated layers and immersive soundscapes. They are presented within distinctive installations at the ICA, including a series of murals threaded through the institute’s galleries, and a hand-tufted carpet. The dual meanings summoned by the exhibition title – both different versions of history and reality, and an interface through which these versions are rendered – are at the heart of the three works.

Metahaven’s films deploy what they describe as ‘truth futurism’ – a mode of speculation on an altered cognitive order, in which the lack of accountability of the ‘post-truth’ era has become emotionally processed. Building on the movement in the collective’s practice between analytic reporting and affective experience, VERSION HISTORY revolves around a state of epistemic uncertainty, spinning off political and cultural narratives where belief and self-deception are in competition with empirical reality.

The exhibition is free to attend and will run between 3rd October 2018 and 13th January 2019.