Oldboy: Death to Dialectics

Hedda Roman

Info: Sometimes it takes distance to be able to recognise something better. This also applies to the present, hence there have always been attempts in the genre of science fiction to consider it speculatively from the future. Hedda Roman follows a similar approach: for their exhibition Oldboy: Death to Dialectics, they have created a fictional universe inspired by Nabokov’s 1962 novel Pale Fire and the 2017 neo-noir science fiction film Blade Runner 2049. Somnambulistically, they look back at a bygone Anthropocene from an imaginable future, oscillating between nostalgia and scepticism. It has passed, but is not yet completely forgotten: thus, in Hedda Roman’s visual world, there are always elements that recall accomplishments and works of the human-centred age; it is full of art-historical references, yet on the one hand they appear contingent and on the other, as if they are simply dissolving and disappearing. Or is perhaps something completely new emerging here?