Maria Antelman, Untitled #2 (tah pah TaHbe), 2006, C-print, 109 × 145 cm. Courtesy of The Apartment, Athens.

Maria Antelman’s show at the War Museum forms a mini-retrospective of her work from the past seven years. This is not the first time this work is shown in Athens, however this is the first exhibition — or rather projection — of her work that enables the viewer to apprehend the artist’s attachment to the tradition of Aldus Huxley’s and his many followers’ futuristic literature, which has been most excellently represented in recent years by Michel Houellebecq.

In fact there is a good deal of common ground between Antelman’s videos and the two authors’ literary works, especially when it comes to the ever-returning themes of death and the promise of eternal life, the mind-body dualism and technology as a tool for the emancipation of society. As a unifying thread Antelman adds the notion of time, weaving complex relationships between past, present and future, through the exploration of older rituals that have survived to this day, as well as earlier and current prognosis of things to come.

Perhaps the most intriguing element in Antelman’s work is her treatment of the American vernacular as a resource. In New Horizons, 2002, photographic footage of a rodeo competition is over-layered by the reassuring voice of a sales representative that addresses Frequently Asked Questions on Cryogenics; Voyage - A Comprehensive Questionnaire (2003), on the other hand, documents the re-enactment of Monmouth Battle, of the 1778 American Revolution. Here, the sequence of immaculately shot images is supplemented by two interchangeable voice-overs that communicate findings in extraterrestrial research and alien messages channelled by an extraterrestrial medium.

Interestingly, both Huxley and Houellebecq consider America to be the precursor of the negative trends they condemn. Their dystopic visions of the future observe the world from a familiar European perspective, one that considers history as a continuous process of degeneration.

Antelman, conversely, seems unwilling to undermine optimistic social myths and convey reality critically. Charmed equally by American popular culture and a teleological perception of the future, the artist remains optimistic even when she recites the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement motto in Untitled, 2008: ‘May We Live Long and Die Out’. Her — Darwinian almost — belief in the best possible choice between many possible futures has compelled her to believe that the future might actually be a better place.