To the People of That Future We Leave That Legacy
In collaboration with Hương Ngô
Single channel digital video, black & white with sound, vinyl, rubble, chalk on black paint, toner on newsprint
2009 – 2022
The late 1930s and early 1940s were marked by global instability and violence. In the midst of such tumult, the second largest American World’s Fair took place in Flushing Meadow, New York in 1939. While it was also an industrial exposition, it was the first to organize explicitly around the concept of the future, with slogans such as “the world of tomorrow” and “the eyes of the Fair are on the future.” Six years later in 1945, at the end of World War II, the United Nations was founded with the intended mission of preventing future wars between countries, and to provide a platform for dialogue and diplomacy. Before moving into their current permanent headquarters in Manhattan, UN leaders conducted one of its most pivotal meetings in one of the World’s Fair’s main pavilions in Flushing Meadow: the 1947 debates and ultimate passing of Resolution 181, which partitioned Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. This project examines this fraught moment in time, where the politics of democracy and the concept of the “common good” became bound up with the language and violent imperatives of capitalism and colonialism. This project imagines the past as our dystopic, violent present.
