apoc. end of the world every day

Apocalyptic sentiments go hand in hand with any crisis, war, or epidemic. New media have elevated the visibility of such events and enabled large swathes of the audience to follow the developments closely. A recent coinage from the 2020 pandemic year, ‘doomscrolling' describes the widespread phenomenon of obsessive reading of negative news online. The introduction of a new term highlights the impact on people that comes from broadcasting of catastrophes and disasters. For a person caught in the middle of events or constantly monitoring them, there is no distinction between the present and the dark past, and there is no way to plan for the future, which can only be imagined. In the early 21st century, the sense of the end of history and "stalling" in that moment found expression in the hauntological dreams about the foregone potential futures.

Fears, omens, persistence of threat and inevitability, transformation of our relations to time and space —artists have long been attentive to such triggers of apocalyptic thinking. In 2002, Triumph gallery presented State of Emergency, a large-scale project reflecting on that particular moment and the post-pandemic world. The new exhibition, Apoc, continues the contemplations on the future and brings together numerous authors who document disasters, formulate various end-of-the-world scenarios, and share their premonitions and revelations.