Exhibition

  • Our Silver City, 2094
    Céline Condorelli, Femke Herregraven, Grace Ndiritu, and Liz Jensen
    Artistic Team
    Prem Krishnamurthy, Sam Thorne, and Nicole Yip
    Curators
    Our Silver City, 2094, Nottingham
    Nov 20, 2021 to Apr 18, 2022
  • GRANTEE
    Prem Krishnamurthy
    GRANT YEAR
    2020

"The Temple," 2021, installation designed by Grace Ndiritu featuring works by Anni Albers, Chiara Camoni, Armando D. Cosmos, Charlotte Johannesson, The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, Vivian Lynn, Elisabeth Wild, Andrea Zittel, and artifacts from Nottingham City Museums. "Our Silver City, 2094" installation view at Nottingham Contemporary, 2021–22. Photo: Stuart Whipps. Courtesy Nottingham Contemporary

Our Silver City travels to the end of this century, featuring works from the last 400 million years. It is an exhibition-as-sci-fi-novel, or vice-versa. Crossing the gallery threshold, we step into a possible future world. This world has been reshaped by decades of crisis and collapse: resource wars and evacuations, plastic-eating bacteria and flooding. Once known as Nottingham, the Silver City is set against a backdrop of fire seasons and widening waterways. Here, communities have embraced different forms of colour production, weather forecasting and spirituality. This exhibition is imagined as a journey unfolding across four galleries, orientated to the cardinal points. It traces a route from change to understanding, from inner knowledge to wisdom. Along the way, we encounter a selection of artefacts, remnants and artworks connecting the long twenty first century with what went before. All exhibitions invite us to travel in time, but this one insists on it.

Prem Krishnamurthy is a designer, writer, and teacher. He currently directs Wkshps, a multidisciplinary design consultancy, and organizes Department of Transformation, an emergent workshop that practices collaborative tools for social change. He has directed and curated large-scale exhibitions including Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows, the 2022 edition of FRONT International, Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art; Our Silver City, 2094 at Nottingham Contemporary; and Ministry of Graphic Design in Sharjah, UAE. Previously, Krishnamurthy founded the design studio Project Projects and the exhibition space P! in New York. He received the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Communications Design in 2015 and KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s “A Year With…” residency fellowship in 2018. His professional papers were acquired by Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies in 2019. In 2022, Domain Books published his experimental, epistolary essay, “On Letters”.