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About the exhibition:

The exhibition focuses on the idea of planned obsolescence: the strategy of designing technological devices with intentionally limited lifespans or lower-quality components, encouraging their eventual replacement. The works foster a dialogue between outdated and present-day technology and reflects about which habits and practices are pushed into collective oblivion through technological development. The projected images emerge and recede, fluctuating between presence and disappearance, memory and oblivion. The works playfully question what technological improvement means. Many of today’s appliances promise a greener or more durable future, while they show signs of malfunctioning as early as after one season. The projectors used in the exhibition have survived far longer than many of the contemporary devices that they depict. The absurdity of this fact is reflected in the recorded texts that accompany one of the installations. 

In this work the Telex Caramate projector is used — a device that was often used for presentations of new appliances in the 1980’s and 1990’s. The projector shows slides of various contemporary products that we use in our everyday lives today, many of them photographed in recycle stations. In contrast to the projector itself, the products shown on the slides are hardly possible to repair — or even open — due to their technical complexity as well as to a commercial logic that favours sales over sustainability. The projector itself is witness to a period when society began to move towards a more neoliberal direction, as the logic of replace-rather-than-repair became the ruling one. A central element in the exhibition is the user manual and care guide — an item that has become increasingly marginal as we are forced into a culture of disposability that this commercial logic has brought forth. The manual functions here as a testimony to a time when producers encouraged users to care for these products, and they were designed to be repaired.