Early 20th century Hungarian artist explored issues of today

Sensing the Future: Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts, an ambitious new exhibition at Plug In ICA, offers an immediate sense of the Hungarian-born artists endless creative energy and constantly questioning mind. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) was one of the key figures in 20th-century modern art, both as an artist and as a professor at the Bauhaus school in Germany.

Winnipeg-based curator Oliver Botar starts with Moholy-Nagys workand its fascinating, far-reaching extensions into new media like photography, film, audio and interactive installationand then goes on to demonstrate how the mans ideas are still timely and topical today.

Working with the Bauhaus Archive in Germany and the Moholy-Nagy Foundation, Botar has brought together works by the artist, including photographs, prints and an iconic Bauhaus-era abstract painting. Some of these pieces are rarely lent out, or even exhibited, so its a real privilege to see them here.

Plug Ins reading room also offers a peek at the magazine produced at the Bauhaus from 1927 to 1931, with its enormously influential typography and graphic design. (Not to mention its content, which is basically a catalogue of the most important movements in avant-garde modernism.)

Moholy-Nagy passionately believed that art and design could work with technology to transform everyday life. The exhibition calls up that very Utopian historical moment, but Botar also brings together contemporary artists from Winnipeg, Canada, the United States and Europe whose work responds to Moholy-Nagys forward-looking ideas.

According to Botar, Moholy-Nagy believed that the role of art was to help people become comfortable with the complexities of modern life. Using photography, for example, Moholy-Nagy promoted what he called The New Vision, a way of seeing that would help people apprehend the accelerated, urban, mechanized modern world around them, with its unrelenting bombardment of sensory information.

Many of the questions Moholy-Nagy explored in the 1920s seem just as relevant to our world, to the age of Instagram and proliferating images, of instantaneous connection and information overload: How do we control technology and not let technology control us? How do we use machinery and technology without becoming disembodied? How can art and technology work together?

Guy Maddin, continuing with his project of remaking lost films, offers a (very Maddin-esque) version of an unproduced Moholy-Nagy script. A group of Berlin-based artists have taken Moholy-Nagys notes for a three-part experimental film and shot it in contemporary Germany. Winnipeg-based Lancelot Coar explores Moholy-Nagys idea of expanded cinema with an intricately beautiful and immersive installation. Erika Lincoln constructs a kinetic sculpture of Plexiglas arrows whose movements mimic weather patterns.

All this work feels very current, which makes it even more extraordinary that Moholy-Nagy was imagining and exploring many of the same issues almost a century ago. In Sensing the Future, the past and the present make a meaningful connection.

Sensing the Future:Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts runs March 8 toMay 11 at Plug In ICA. There will be an opening receptionFriday, March 7th at 7:00 p.m.