Esch-sur-Alzette and the cross-border area in the south of Luxembourg, are in transformation: a former steel industry region will transform into a center for future-oriented knowledge and innovative creativity. Esch2022 — European Capital of Culture invited Ars Electronica Export to become part of this transformation through curating an exhibition in the Möllerei. The exhibition invites visitors to explore art as a tool for us humans to understand and envision the future. The exhibition runs from 3rd of September until the 27th of November 2022.
These are the attributes that Ars Electronica is highlighting in the exhibition «IN TRANSFER – A New Condition«. It approaches these concepts and wants to explore what the nature of change is. What are the issues compelling us to change as a society and which ones are in urgent need of change? What are the mechanisms that drive change, why is it prevented, by what means can it be accomplished? And what role can art play in this?
If we take a brief look at the daily press, it quickly becomes clear how great the everyday complexity of human existence has become and what contradictions result from it: the cruel war against Ukraine initiated by Russia, the increasingly dramatic climate change, the pandemic, the issue of exclusion and minorities, the question of distribution, energy, and resources; also, the question of culture in the digital realm, the digital transformation and ethics for artificial intelligence. The dramatic need for action inherent in all these issues, together with the elementary and existential dimension of these challenges, requires a renegotiation of the present that makes commonality and collaboration indispensable.
The difficulty of responding to these contradictions reveals social tendencies that polarise and exclude. How can we recognise change not as compromise, provocation, or personal limitation, but as quality, skill, and empowerment? Can art play a role in this? Certainly not in the sense of overall responsibility. But art can try to offer a space, an alternative, a neutral place, in which change in its contradictory complexity can be experienced. Art and culture can thus represent an offer to society, an artistic, social laboratory in which reality and the future are simulated. In this way, it offers a space of experience that takes on the issues that force us to make fundamental changes, but which also has the quality of being a guide for change itself.
«IN TRANSFER – A New Condition» presents the work of artists operating in the space where art, technology and society intersect, artists who are always in the places where transformation is happening. In the exhibition, visitors will meet a generation of artists who, as citizens of this world, wish to contribute new perspectives that can help us make farsighted decisions.
Source: European Capital of Culture, Esch2022