COLOGNE.- We live in a changing world. The breakneck speed of digitalisation and globalisation processes is putting paid to familiar structures. Polarities fragment into complex diversities, while hierarchical orders crumble, only to meld into a networked coexistence on an equal footing.
How can we understand this new world, which is now beyond the grasp of our old way of thinking? What questions are being asked now and what hypotheses can help us to find answers? Maybe art has the answers? After all, artists have always been the seismographs of society, responding to the challenges of radically changing times and developing alternative visions.
One of the most hotly debated present-day questions is that of diversity, equality and justice. Sociologists and politicians explore this question, as do philosophers, economists and – needless to say – artists. In art, of course, polarised thinking has already been largely transcended and coexistence on equal terms is often axiomatic.
Future structures need openness and flexibility. The exhibitions at
PRISKA PASQUER also correspond with these principles, as for most part they devote themselves to a single theme over a longer period of time. Seen as a process rather than a statement, they make no claims, but ask questions instead. The artworks shown there open up new possibilities for thinking and discussion. Repeated exposure in particular often allows new ideas to develop.
In the exhibition series “ON EQUAL TERMS”, PRISKA PASQUER brings together artistic works and projects that address this thematic issue. The series of exhibitions already illustrates this on a formal level by consciously juxtaposing works of such diverse media as video, sculpture, painting, drawing, performance, photography or digital art.
“ON EQUAL TERMS” presents works by artists that experiment with the notion of equal status and of a new sense of community in our globally networked world. In doing so, they set off on roads less trodden like lateral thinker Alexander von Humboldt who, with his explorations and contacts around the world, already lived in a globalised world and thought in holistic terms back in the early 19th century.
In a way, the exhibition takes up where the three-part “RESET” (2015-2017) left off in that it deals with artistic reflection on the far-reaching developments of the digital age. Under the maxim “Art in a Changing World”, PRISKA PASQUER compared contemporary art with modernity, Bauhaus, Italian futurism and virtual spaces against the backdrop of the digital age.
“ON EQUAL TERMS” takes this one step further, examining how today’s artists are free to think in new correlations without being constricted by prejudice, how they deal with networked communication models and how they reconcile equality with diversity. In a world in which traditional ideas and outlooks are lost in the maelstrom of new technologies and discoveries, artists can ask the right questions and confront us with things that we might not understand at the time but may at some point in the future.
This exhibition can be viewed by appointment only.
