This exhibition concentrates on the power of recollection, combats the dead tissue of nostalgia, and argues that the future is open - if it can be seen for what it is.

Leave your rose-tinted glasses of the past and the present at the reception desk and step into the near future to answer these questions: is the future open and how to we keep it open – in a nice way?

 As Carlo Rovelli plainly shows, Reality is not what it seems; and the past is not even passed.  With a couple of outstanding exceptions (the Afro-Futurism of 1950s Sun Ra; Low and The Next Day by David Bowie) even science fiction envisages the future as nostalgia for a heroic past.  So we have to find other ways forward, as the Coat-of-Arms of this city suggest.  Here in a quiet place in the centre of bankrupt Birmingham, a pressing attempt is made to seriously examine the future by examining the plight of an outer suburb that is now invariably portrayed as a new crime neighbourhood.

The exhibition  Picture Show – Dick Frak and Friends  is free and runs from Monday, 23 September to Saturday, 19 October 2024 at The Sir William Blake Richmond Gallery at the Birmingham & Midland Institute, 9 Margaret Street, B3 3 BS.

 The exhibition is accompanied by a 30-page catalogue, an audioguide and a series of interactive talks.

 Press and Media enquiries to: dick@frak.eclipse.co.uk