Century Safe (Chicago) is an exhibition of artworks and objects that access contemporaneity through strategies of mapping, tracing and archiving.

The exhibit theme is inspired by the world’s first intentional, scheduled time capsule, the Century Safe, which debuted at the Philadelphia World’s Exposition exactly 140 years ago.

As a collective curatorial provocation that evokes the twin spirits of the archive and engagement with an unknown audience of tomorrow, the artworks and objects collected for Century Safe (Chicago) will be shown alongside a quasi-functional piece of archival furniture (a capsule of sorts) designed by John Preus.  Situated in, on, and around his work, the exhibition features objects by artists who reflexively distill the contemporary experience and artworks that purposefully deflect the norms of the art object's ecosystem, lifecycle and legacy: some objects interrogate ideas of material durability, archive-ability or the mutability of meaning over time.

By placing the afterlife of our exhibition into a speculative, provisional realm we hope to use the curatorial process to engage some of the most interesting ideas in our orbit – of audience, futurity, temporality, preservation and zeitgeist – while at the same time, creating an interesting space for the audience to deeply consider the ideas of the artists with whom we have engaged. 

How are exhibitions (and artworks) important as idiosynchratic stewards of social memory, andhow might the meaning we find here migrate to an audience of the future? 

Read a longer curatorial text here