Never before has art been so close to life. And death. The climate crisis, experienced on a daily basis through the painful loss of biodiversity, the seasons, as well as the lack of hope for the future in general, requires the mobilisation of powerful layers of imagination. We have to face the irreversibility, the exhaustion of existing economic and political paradigms. So what can we learn from artists and artists?
Contemporary art, as a style, discipline and format of production, distribution, relations with the viewer, is unfortunately burdened with several serious flaws: a tendency to exaggeration, extravagance, competition, elitism, overproduction, pumping and waste. Meanwhile, the practices of involvement in generating social change do not always lead to the creation of a material work that can be displayed in a museum or gallery. They elude the advice of institutions and migrate, at their own request or out of necessity, outside the world of art. Very often it is precisely the world of ecological activism, experimental agriculture or revitalisation of entire ecosystems. All the better for them.
Sebastian Cichocki – chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. He was the author and co-author of exhibitions, among others in the Polonia Pavilion at the 52nd and 54th Venice Biennale of Art (in 2007 with Monika Sosnowska, in 2011 with Yael Bartana), “Rainbow in the Darkness. About joys and torments of faith” at SALT in Istanbul and Malmö Konstmuseum, “Making use. Life in the Post-Artistic Age”, “Zofia Rydet. Record 1978-1990”, “The penumbral age. Art in the time of planetary change” in the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
