At Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Francesco Arena, Ed Atkins with Simon Thompson, Rosella Biscotti, Candice Breitz, Daniela Ortiz and Artur Zwmijewski are the seven protagonists who firmly hold their gaze on their own time, so as to perceive not its light but its darkness. All eras for those who experience contemporariness are obscure, so The Humans connoting people who knows how to see vivid fragments of present truths. The perspective of these artists on current events opens up a different, profound view of our world. The group show at Kunstmuseum proofs that reporting reality is a tricky, endlessly reflexive process, an uroborus of self-generating, self-devouring facts and narratives that themselves create other facts and narratives, which can then spread virally. A circular reporting, in which news is declared as if it were confirmed by multiple sources when it actually emanated from a single, possibly fraudulent source.

The Humans, on the contrary, starts with the well-known Sky News Live (2015) by Ed Atkins and Simon Thompson, a live stream of Britain’s Sky News cable station (on mute) displayed across six large flat-screen monitors. Thus it’s always changing, always up-to-date, touching on all aspects around the globe of how we live now. Envisioned by art-star Atkins and his friend Thompson as the ultimate readymade, it follows an earlier and less ambitious film featuring 14 hours of found footage from the Science Channel’s hit show How It’s Made, consisting of roughly three-minute clips from the program that show how various ordinary objects are manufactured—but cutting away just before you find out what the object actually is.

The exhibition encompasses also TLDR (2017), the multi-channel video installation that has been commissioned by and is being debuted on the B3 Biennial. TLDR is a portrait of a community of sex workers who live and work in Cape Town. The work grew out of a series of interviews and an intensive workshop with the featured participants, extending an ongoing conversation between Breitz and SWEAT (Sex Workers Education & Advocacy Taskforce), the non-profit organisation with which the sex workers are affiliated. Very much a sequel to Breitz’s Love Story (2016), TLDR invites reflection on the relationship between whiteness, privilege and visibility; and on the shrinkage of attention spans within an information economy that fetishizes celebrity and thrives on entertainment. Addressing the often-fraught relationship between art and activism, the work points a finger at itself to bluntly question whether and how artists living privileged lives can succeed in amplifying calls for social justice and meaningfully representing marginalised communities. 

Another artist such as Daniela Ortiz presents a denunciation video titled FDTD forcible drugging to deport (2012). It reports deportations made by the United States of America, declaring that in 2011 the highest number of deportations were conducted by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Since 2003, deportees have been given doses up to 55mg of anxiolytics, sedatives, tranquilizers and muscle relaxants drugs. The drugs used are Haldol, Cogentin and Ativan. In 2006 the Peruvian government signed the Free Trade Agreement with United States of America, whose objectives are eliminating immigration obstacles to trade, consolidating access to goods and services and fostering private investment in and between both countries.
Destabilizing the very concept of consensus reality, this exhibition boasts human landscape characterizing fake news as wish fulfillment in the service of attaining hopeful futures and unobtainable realities which at Kunstmuseum seem off, anachronistic while the truth arises as a new reading access to upcoming days.