From September 21 through November 11, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's 2018 International Festival of Firsts will host hundreds of performances and visual arts events, with more than 80 percent free and open to the public. Included is a remarkable collection of future-thinking installations, gallery displays and exhibitions, Many grapple with our relationship to technology, modeling not just machinery but the many possible futures—some utopian, some dystopian—ahead for the human species.
Art isn't a luxury; it's the necessary work of expanding and enriching human consideration, maybe even enough to empower us to change our future, which grows more uncertain as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels creep up and a species-wide catastrophe looms. Art is available to us even when political systems break down and short-term thinking overwhelms innovation and forethought. By sharing wisdom across cultures and showing different ways to see and live, we become more capable of understanding one another and taking control of our collective destiny.
This contrast, between the dark possibilities and our highest potential, is captured in Peju Alatise's sculpture Flying Girls, on display at the August Wilson Center. Alatise, a Nigerian artist, writer and fellow at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art, based Flying Girls on a short story she wrote about a Yoruba girl who lives a double life, as both a domestic servant in the megacity of Lagos (population: 16 million) and in a dreamworld, where she can fly.
Simultaneously anti-colonial, Afro-futurist and attuned to our troubled relationship with nature—she described her work to art and culture publication Art/ctualité as a "cry in the wilderness"—Flying Girls asks that the future of Africa (and humanity) not be dictated but collectively imagined.
"I don't have a crystal ball, of course, I don't know what the future holds, but one of the things we've been doing at the cultural trust is to try and get people beyond where they are currently and help take them new places," J. Kevin McMahon, president of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, said of the Festival of Firsts programming which incorporates art from 20 different countries.
"Of course, some of these things are looking as much backward as forward, but certainly one of the intentions of the Cultural Trust and the Festival of Firsts is to provide that opportunity to look outward, outside of one's comfort zone, and have a world perspective. We can learn a lot about ourselves as a community by looking outward," McMahon said.
Installations at Pittsburgh's SPACE and 707 Penn Gallery look at technology more directly, displaying how fascinating and intricate machinery interact, functionally or dysfunctionally, with our biology.
In Samuel St. Aubin's Tablespoons, part of the Machine Culture exhibition at SPACE, microchip-controlled spoons, arrayed in a ring (and looking like an early version of Tony Stark's arc reactor from Iron Man), spin eggs around in complicated patterns, never dropping them but always dramatizing the inherent fragility of this mechanized process.
Looking like something from a horror movie, Ujoo and Limhee Young's Machine With Hair Caught in It is a complex arrangement of gears, with all the chrome precision of a car engine, hopelessly tangled with long, black human hairs. Will our industrial destruction keep on, even when we're crushed in the gears?
That's just the beginning. Other kinetic and machine creations are on display, from such artists as Zoro Feigl, Kristoffer Myskja, Henrik Menne, Oz Malul, Keny Marshall, Kausik Mukhopadhyay, Ali Miharbi and Peter Flemming.
"There are some things over there that are just wild," McMahon told Newsweek. "They are objects of fascination."
The Festival of Firsts also includes some spectacular large-scale exhibits, like Noemi Schipfer and Takami Nakamoto's hypnotic light installation Narrow V.3, which will be joined with their trippy Daydream V.5 at Wood Street Galleries.
Adopting a similarly futuristic aesthetic is Beyond, an immersive installation that places viewers inside a tunnel of lights, bombarding them with coordinated lights and sound. It's likely the closest any human will ever get to experiencing the Star Gate from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In addition to visual arts, the Festival of Firsts has music, plays and dance from around the world, including a multimedia performance of Joan Didion's landmark essay "The White Album," which works to reconcile the past and future. "She wrestles with a period of American history that raised some of our most socially disruptive movements," director Lars Jan said in a Festival of Firsts video. "When you hear her words, it's hard to miss the echoes these movements have in the U.S. today."
McMahon also recommended the darkly satirical political comedy In the Tunnel, about two Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers facing off in a tunnel between Gaza and Israel. The play has two different endings, with the audience deciding in advance their answer to a simple question, which resonates far beyond geopolitics in the Middle East: "Do you think there's light at the end of the tunnel or not?"
Tickets and events can be found on the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's website.
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