Sorcha Dallas

Philippe Parreno, The Wrong Gallery (Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni & Ali Subotnick), Charles de Meaux, Alan Michael, Nathaniel Mellors, Charles Avery, Makoto Aida, Mathieu Copeland, Norbert Schoerner, Carey Young, Roger Hiorns, Milena Dragicevic, Olivia Plender, Martin Sastre, Gail Pickering, Erik van Lieshout, Doug Fishbone, Keith Wilson, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Liam Gillick & Sean Dack, Jens Hoffmann & Claire Fitzsimmons.

Curated by Tom Morton & Catharine Patha

The very first cinema trailer was shown in 1912 at New York’s Rye Beach, following an episode of the Paramount serial ‘The Adventures of Kathlyn’ in which the eponymous heroine was cast to the lions. Asking ‘Does she escape the lions’ pit? See next week’s thrilling chapter’, it seemed to speak about the future, but, like all trailers, it in fact spoke about the past. (Kathlyn’s fate, after all, had been decided long before the Rye Beach audience gasped its first anticipatory gasps). Trailers, then. are caught up in a complex temporal paradox. Although prophetic, they only prophesize that which has already happened. Wile Man in the Holocene’s first exhibition ‘Trailer’ will operate, in one sense, in much the same way as a set of conventional cinema trailers by providing a glimpse of ‘coming attractions, it also engages with the proposition that cultural products, in our current climate, are often consumed before they’re actually encountered, be it in the form of speculation, pirated rough-cuts, PR company approved previews and ‘leaks’, advertisements or press coverage. It is hard to refute that most individuals have seen more film trailers than they have films, read more book-blurbs than they have books, and browsed more exhibition reviews than they have exhibitions. The consequence of this is cultural biosphere in which synopses, fragments, and the fragmentary stuff of commentary lives an arguably fuller life than ‘whole’ works. Thought about in terms of time ‘Trailer’ is an exhibition that is both comprised of traces of yesterday, and points to a possible tomorrow, while never quite belonging to today.