Sometimes you can be nostalgic for what is yet to come. That strange feeling of longing for a future as yet unknown, that melancholic pining for the possible. Sometimes a space can do this, a space laden with time, a space filled with the past that is moving fast towards a future. A space inhabiting multiple temporalities, multiple tenses. SILVER SEHNSUCHT aims to interrogate this particular feeling of ambivalence, to uncover the fragments of past actions, the residues of present longing, and the dizzily flickering futures that exist within all spaces and all times.

Focusing in particular on the district of Silvertown in which the exhibition is situated, a space stranded somewhere between the colonial forces of Britain's past (the home of the eponymous S.W. Silver and Co Rubber Works but so too of the East India Company and Tate & Lyle) and the shiny financial power of it's present (of Canary Wharf and the site formerly known as the Millennium Dome), the post-industrial spaces which surround The Silver Building are currently on the verge of a major transformation, an impending regeneration project which strikes right at the heart of the eponymous Sehnsucht of our tittle.

That explains the Silver, but what is this Sehnsucht? Much like the Portuguese expression saudade, the German term Sehnsucht is a word famously difficult to translate into English. Often simply rendered as nostalgia, Sehnsucht, in fact, moves far from the historically directed leaning of its English translation. Working through prospection and evaluation as much as retrospection, encompassing sensibilities for past, present and future simultaneously, Sehnsucht can be understood to emphasise an affirmative yearning toward the possible rather then stale turn to the past. It can thus be grasped as a term which acts to stimulate and galvanise progress, bringing together what is gained and lost, what is present and absent, even whilst functioning within a fundamentally ambivalent modality.

Bringing together artists working across sound, performance, video, and installation, SILVER SEHNSUCHT will thus critically reflect on both the strange merging of temporalities that the term connotes as well as the ways these are reflected in the location of Silvertown itself. It will explore the bittersweet feeling which emerges from the increasing speed of contemporary world, the feeling of loss for something unknown in the anxious precess of ushering in something new.

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 Silver Sehnsucht Exhibition, curated by Mara-Johanna Kölmel, Silvana Lagos and Rafael Schacter.