Shai Kremer - Concrete Abstract

The year 2026 is looming, an appropriate time for humankind to examine to what extent Fritz Lang’s pessimist vision, as presented in his 1926 film Metropolis, has materialized. Almost a hundred years later, will indeed his apocalyptic prophecy, in which laborers will return to fight for their basic human rights and economic freedom and against capitalist and fascist forces which dictate the pace of construction, scientific and technological development leading to all control of power materialize?
Today we watch the world in a never-ending race against itself as well as the reality which is redesigning itself at a speed we cannot follow. We gaze at gigantic cities where airplanes and drones hover amidst their crowded skyscrapers, and we are lost in the cobwebs of highways and interchanges and the endless lines of cars entangled in them.
At this very moment, we are planning for ourselves and for future generations the futuristic city, one which will duplicate the idea of an industrial, estranged and cruel world, where the rich founders of Metropolis, whose sole interest was their own luxury and indulgences lived, oblivious of the hardworking, homeless and enslaved laborers fighting for their livelihood.
The exhibition METROPOLIS will therefore present humankind’s race to reach further and higher, not necessarily for the benefit of the world’s inhabitants. It is a race in which the big cities - those which are developing at a dazzling pace, not always in correlation with the real needs of their inhabitants and the natural conditions accompanying this process - compete. It is a process in which the interior design and the externally reflected façades are unbalanced. It is an equation in which the side of functional design is severed from the side of appearances which strive mainly to satisfy urges. An equation which is tipped against scientific and technological development and in favor of their abuse for improvements in urban space.
So where is humankind heading to?
METROPOLIS, if you will, is a renewed version of the Biblical Tower of Babylon and another expression of humankind’s ambition to conquer the world of tomorrow. It is humankind’s determined way of breaching the boundaries of its imagination and capabilities, at all costs, making use of the immense knowledge it has accumulated, which multiplies itself in this computerized era in which we live.