Opening Event Saturday 13 July, 7:30 – 10pm • A group show Curated by Greg McCartney featuring artists living and working in the City of Derry

A city in the middle of a year of culture and in the midst of regeneration schemata holding a contemporary art exhibition featuring artists based in the locale poses some questions including: Is it a celebration of local art production? Is it a critique of cultural branding? Is it (however unintentionally) a part of that cultural branding process? It is of course to a degree all of these things but none completely.

Whilst on one hand Tomorrow’s Almost Over is a Derry artist’s exhibition there is intended to be a much broader reading than that of the purely geographical. Also, there are no direct references to the state of the city and its populace, or City of Culture and culturally-led regeneration. Rather, it is a poetic exploration of personal and social landscapes pondering now that the ‘future’ (take your pick of any number of definitions from A to Z, from post-conflict to post-Fordist etc. etc.) is here, what do you do? Where do you go? Who do you need to know?

There aren’t any definitive answers of course and none of the exhibited work suggests explicitly that there are. Indeed the title Tomorrow’s Almost Over implicitly carries a curatorial distrust of overriding political, socio-cultural or religious philosophies as it suggests that the promise of any bright new future is likely to fail.

The use of a line from a television show can also be seen as a critique of and antidote to the tiresome overuse of contemporary art/curatorial tropes. Tomorrow’s Almost Over is taken from the theme tune of ‘Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?’ an early 1970s BBC comedy set in the North of England that focused on change and loss. Just as the Sixties were considered a highpoint in terms of idealism and protest so the years following saw the failure of that idealism particularly amongst the young and would lead eventually to the triumph of consumerism. This was a show that offered us an uncertain horizon, an exploration of that moment between sleeping and waking in which we aren’t sure who we are or how we got there or importantly what happens next? Tomorrow’s Almost Over similarly is a critique of a promise in whatever form it takes, inevitably therefore suspicious of its own rationale.