John Sears

Good morning! I’m so grateful to announce that “Moments of the Unknown “will be on exhibition for the first time in New York City on June 9th at 6pm located at @nguyenwahed RSVP link in replies below 🔗 Curated by @MarleneCorbun Centered around Justin Aversano’s new film Moments of the Unknown, the exhibition presents the work in its entirety for the very first time. Conceived during a year-long journey across seven continents and countless landscapes, the project invites viewers on a cinematic voyage through cultures, environments, and human encounters from around the world. Moving between intimate portraiture and expansive documentary observation, the film constructs a visual meditation on what it means to witness humanity at a moment of profound technological and social transformation. Blending the nostalgic materiality of Super-8 film with artificial intelligence and blockchain technology, Moments of the Unknown revisits the legacy of humanist image-making through a distinctly contemporary lens. Composed of ten-second moving portraits filmed over 366 days, the work unfolds as a poetic reflection on memory, cultural identity, migration, ritual, and global interconnectedness. Echoing the universal aspirations of Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man while reimagining them for the digital age, Aversano positions the moving image as an emotional archive and a speculative form of transmission, capable of preserving fleeting traces of human existence for future generations. The project’s formal language is shaped by the tension between obsolete and emerging technologies. The grain, fragility, and tactile imperfections of Super-8 film stand in contrast to the immaterial infrastructures of artificial intelligence and blockchain systems. Rather than opposing these mediums, Aversano allows them to coexist, suggesting a continuum between past, present, and future modes of recording and circulating human experience. In this context, the work reflects on memory itself, and on the evolving technologies through which memory is constructed, stored, and transmitted. Emerging from the film, a series of Movie Stills extends the project into a more tactile and contemplative form. Printed on handmade flower paper, these works isolate fleeting moments selected by the artist from the moving image, transforming ephemeral sequences into physical objects fixed in time. Removed from cinematic duration, the portraits acquire a sculptural stillness that emphasizes gesture, gaze, and atmosphere. Four of these works will be presented as part of the exhibition, reinforcing the dialogue between permanence and impermanence that runs throughout Aversano’s practice. Alongside newly encountered faces, Moments of the Unknown also revisits figures central to Aversano’s earlier body of work, notably twins from his acclaimed Twin Flames series. Extending this reflection on repetition, doubling, and human connection, the exhibition includes Doppelganger #258, created in collaboration with Kim Asendorf, whose algorithmic structure resonates with Nguyen Wahed’s code-based visual language. The work introduces another layer to the exhibition’s exploration of identity and perception, examining how digital systems reproduce, fragment, and reinterpret the human image. Taken together, the works in the exhibition propose a broader meditation on temporality and transmission. Across film, photography, and generative processes, Aversano considers how images operate as vessels through time, preserving the past, shaping the present, and projecting themselves toward imagined futures. Positioned between documentary archive and speculative fiction, Moments of the Unknown reflects on the enduring desire to record human presence: to leave traces, create connections, and inscribe memory into permanence in an increasingly dematerialized world.