Memories of the Future: Educational Complex I – IV

In each print, Jakob Kolding juxtaposes photographs of different architectural models from the 1960s, transforming them into landscapes that are at once familiar and alien. Through printing the photogravure technique in black-and-white, the works acquire a simultaneously dream-like and documentary quality that further complicates the distinction between historical record and science-fictional dream. The motifs are partly informed by places to which the artist has a personal connection, where the architecture formed the framework for both upbringing and education. The architectural models thus become not only representations of collective visions of the future, but also reflections of Kolding’s own lived experience.
The series title partly draws inspiration from the book Memories of the Future (1929) by Russian writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887–1950) and the American artist Mike Kelley’s (1954–2012) work Educational Complex (1995). Through these four photogravures, Kolding reflects on the hopes and ambitions embedded in the architectural models of the 1960s, and on the potential of architecture in a space between what came to be and what was never realised.