World out of Joint

Climate change, pandemics and countless conflicts are leading to a fundamental disorientation that characterises our times: The world seems to have fallen apart. Traditional explanations are no longer adequate to deal with the complexity of the present, which oscillates between digital communication and radical individualism, past, present and an uncertain future. Disoriented between innovation and tradition, Western society is in permanent crisis mode.

Art reflects these phenomena and develops its own strategies for dealing with them. Especially in large-scale installations, the audience is confronted with an abundance of information and events that simultaneously test their receptivity. The clear distinction between artwork and audience dissolves in favour of multimedia spaces in which the internet and digitalisation take on leading roles. Installations are no longer viewed, but experienced; they set an interactive process in motion that also facilitates a variety of approaches.

The exhibition unites installations by nine international artists of the younger generation. All the installations deal with different aspects of content, whether artificial intelligence, ecology or gender fluidity. They illustrate that social questions can no longer be answered in a valid way. Each one forms a cosmos that lives from the interplay of time and space, of different objects and media formats. This inner density is continually co-produced by the audience as it arranges and assembles them according to the situation. Together, the nine installations create the image of a world that has come apart at the seams, in which ambivalences have to be endured to the point of pain – in order to interpret them productively.