The Exhibition infuses the publicly accessible terrain of ASIAT with in-situ commissioned works. With a strong focus on cross-disciplinary practices, hovering between artworks, collaborative projects, stage design, scenography and architecture. The Exhibition runs from mid-July until September, and is reconfigured for its final destination: the Festival.
The artistic program and participating artists will be announced by the end of April.
Our generation is getting ready, preparing itself, getting armed for the coming fall. Of the ecosystem, of capitalism, of an illusionary democracy, of humanity, of ethics?
Rather than succumbing to a nihilistic cynicism, rather than surrendering to useless emptiness, this apocalyptic mood also entails the promise of a new start. Victims of Weltschmerz and melancholy become the winners of this new world order. They know how to deal with a fragmented worldview more than that they can accept a singular and centralized one. They operate within power relations that occur horizontally, and accept and even find richness in conflicting opinions. They rediscover nature, the organic, their own body, and a refound authenticity amidst an industrial wasteland filled with technological ruins, artificial intelligence, and claustrophobic algorithms.
The exhibition at Horst brings together artists who are empowered by these changes, and who redefine their fear for the future as an exploratory optimism. The works and interventions touch upon the botanical, folkloric tales and oral traditions, ancient and contemporary myths, but also technology and the Anthropocene, collective transgression and the romance brought by decadence.
ASIAT - a former military terrain - counts as a symptomatic relic of the conservative status quo currently trying to protect its hegemony while crumbling down globally. This setting reminds of us this power structure long lost, irrelevant in today's society, strengthening the self-confidence for this new agency and makeability.