| Past-Forward brings together 29 international contemporary artists whose works manipulate, replay, and disrupt borrowed structures from mass culture, media, art history and industry. The artists in Past-Forward question the means and ends of artistic production in the face of an increasingly globalized culture. Appropriation, quotation, re-contextualization and revision are common techniques in the works, alternately executed with melancholy, parody, irreverence and indifference. Art history is no longer a linear development, but is rather a zigzag between different temporalities: the past, the present, and the future. Past-Forward is also a response to its installation site, a building located at 176 Prince of Wales Road in London. It addresses that building’s multiple layers of history: the place was built in 1867, the same year that Charles Baudelaire died. | 
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Vincent Honoré is the curator of Past-Forward, which was on view at 176 in London in August.
Installation shot of Past-Forward at 176, 2008. Photo copyright of Stephen White. Courtesy of Zabludowicz Collection.Past-Forward brings together 29 international contemporary artists whose works manipulate, replay, and disrupt borrowed structures from mass culture, media, art history and industry. The artists in Past-Forward question the means and ends of artistic production in the face of an increasingly globalized culture. Appropriation, quotation, re-contextualization and revision are common techniques in the works, alternately executed with melancholy, parody, irreverence and indifference. Art history is no longer a linear development, but is rather a zigzag between different temporalities: the past, the present, and the future.
Past-Forward is also a response to its installation site, a building located at 176 Prince of Wales Road in London. It addresses that building’s multiple layers of history: the place was built in 1867, the same year that Charles Baudelaire died. Until the 1960s, it was the central Methodist Chapel for the Kings Cross and Camden area. From the 1960s until recently it was the North London Drama Centre. Now it’s a private foundation dedicated to contemporary art.
The building—like the works in the exhibition—is a space constantly being re-interpreted by its owners, and the collaborators were invited to interact with it. It shows the scars of its successive functions and the loss of its previous religious and symbolic use. For Past-Forward, some artists were asked to reinterpret specific rooms, adding an additional layer to the site’s history and transforming it into a “House of Leaves,” a building in perpetual mutation. New commissions for the show include Claudia Wieser’s large cubist and abstract composition: hundreds of photocopies were directly pasted onto the wall and created a surface onto which other artists’ works were installed. Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard, Damien Roach, and Florian Slotawa, whose work is featured in the Zabludowicz Collection, were asked to think about new ways of exhibiting existing works, sometimes resulting in new commissions for the show. As a result of this process, Florian Slotawa created his first work with paint: a vast colorful mural in the upper space, the colors of which derive from everyday objects from the Zabludowicz family home. Nina Beier and Marie Lund reinterpreted the choir tradition with a sound installation consisting of vintage speakers broadcasting a love song.
A visitor to the exhibition will encounter different rhythms in each room. Past-Forward was installed as a succession of widely divergent visual experiences, from large open rooms to more intimate and unsettled spaces. For many of the artists in this exhibition, it is the first time their work has been shown in the U.K., so the exhibition will be a landmark in their personal histories as well.
