ACTION FOR A BETTER FUTURE THAN SURVIVAL

ACTION FOR A BETTER FUTURE THAN SURVIVAL

Oliver Ressler 
13.11.—06.12.2026

Откриване / Opening
👉 13.11 (friday)—18:00
👉 Cube Gallery — Toplocentrala

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👉 Artist Talk with Oliver Ressler
👉 14.11—18:30

👉 Mediated Dialogues within the Exhibition
👉 22 November, 18:00 and 19:00 (advance registration required)

The future is the cutting edge of modernity. It is not merely a time yet to come, but a horizon of expectations, aspirations, and promises in which humanity’s dream of a better life is meant to be fulfilled. Technological advancement, industrialisation, and economic growth, intertwined with the idea of continuous progress, have shaped the understanding of the future as a space of development and prosperity. Although operating through different political and economic models, both capitalism and institutionalised socialism have bound their projects to the promise of a better tomorrow.

Today, however, this promise has been called into question. The future has become a category in crisis, in which expectations of progress are giving way to uncertainty, anxiety, and a sense of impending catastrophe. The crisis of the future is, above all, a crisis of the present, marked by profound contradictions within the mechanisms of social and economic development. These contradictions manifest themselves on both local and global levels, calling into question not only the possibility of a better life but the very conditions of human existence.

Austrian artist Oliver Ressler is among those who have consistently explored and made visible the contradictions of capitalist society, globalisation, and the ideas of development, progress, and economic growth over the past decades. His works frequently address existential questions concerning how people live, secure their livelihoods, and gain access to the commons — essential resources such as air, water, and food. His films, addressing migration, the private appropriation of public spaces, the displacement of communities, and the transformation of urban environments, reveal conflicts between the interests of capital and people's right to determine the conditions of their own lives.

Ressler often works in close collaboration with activists and local communities engaged in specific social and political struggles. At times, his works have faced censorship in certain political contexts, as they intervene too directly in the social and political conflicts of the places concerned.

The exhibition in Sofia brings together works created in recent years that reveal different dimensions of these conflicts within specific geographical and social contexts. In The Labour that Remains (2026), filmed in the industrial city of Volta Redonda, Brazil, production emerges simultaneously as a source of livelihood and as a destructive force threatening the health and lives of the local community. In After the Barrage, the Deluge (2022), processes of urban modernisation in Casablanca, Morocco, pit economic interests against the right of residents to inhabit and determine the future of their own environment. We Are the Forest Enclosed by the Wall (2025) follows the struggle to protect the Bosco d'Arneo forest in southern Italy, threatened by the expansion of an automotive testing facility, revealing the paradox of technological progress achieved at the expense of natural ecosystems. In Ancestral Future Rising (2023), filmed in the Pacto region of Ecuador, the resistance of local communities against mining projects raises questions about the exploitation of natural resources and the environmental cost of global economic development.

Alongside these works, the exhibition presents for the first time the new photographic works Imagine (2026), based on public interventions carried out by the artist in various cities across Europe and Latin America. The series places political imagination at its centre - the capacity to envision alternative forms of democracy, ownership, social organisation, and collective life.

Can we imagine a rehabilitation of the very concept of the future? A future beyond utopia and ideology, one that exists not merely as a promise but is created through processes of renegotiating the present? A future connected to reclaiming spaces for the commons and shared resources, to struggles for access to them, and to the continuous defence and renegotiation of the conditions of life?

Although geographically dispersed, the conflicts documented and presented in Oliver Ressler's works extend far beyond the boundaries of the places in which they unfold. They outline a global landscape of inequalities while simultaneously acquiring a universal dimension, as they address fundamental questions concerning human life in the contemporary world.

The exhibition is supported by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport and the Austrian Cultural Forum Sofia.