Monitor (1974) and Sounds of These Words (1989) in CURRENT: Contemporary Art From Scotland (Phase Two), at Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, China

Phase Two of CURRENT: Contemporary Art from Scotland grasps the restless energies of now by means of two contrasting takes on the moving image; REWIND and >>FFWD. Crashing in and out of focus, cutting and editing time the moving image is the aesthetic medium of the contemporary. Yet as a medium it holds more than just the present moment, its play of film strips and pixels is marked by radical histories. Excavating this radical history encapsulated in seminal artists’ video works from the 1970’s and 80’s REWIND provides an in-depth historical perspective with which to grasp the condition of the contemporary as a moving image falling in and out of history.