How To Live Together

How To Live Together
Exhibition

Location: Kunsthalle Wien

The current social and political crisis is shaking up our liberal society, disclosing an uncertain everyday world. Social conflicts, the polarization of social groups, impoverishment, and the fear of threats and terror, have become the defining elements of our time. Global developments affect our daily lives and demand new categories of political thought and action.

The theme-based exhibition How to Live Together explores the fragile conditions of living together in terms of individual and social dimensions. The focus is not only on the latest political and economic changes, but also on changing social relationships. New ideas of cohabitation are replacing traditional images of the family and ways of living. New forms of social interaction are emerging, and new forms of partnership are taking root that require contemporary relationship concepts. Starting with everyday experiences in different historical spaces, How To Live Together deals with the changing conditions of the private and political, the individual and society.

Art has always served as a medium to portray the social character of a given time and to provide a reflection of a lived experience. The exhibiting artists are precise observers of their time. Their works make use of various media to document how social structures manifest themselves in our everyday gestures and social situations.

In part, the artists draw on their personal experiences or on experiences they were able to observe directly. There are stories of flight and migration, experiences of racism and exclusion, but also of solidarity and wholeness in diversity. All of these experiences interrelate and tie in with one another – not as singular events, but as structural components that mark and define subjective experience. For the artists dealing with their own heritage and the impact of the colonial past on the present are factors that also play a role.

An extensive supplementary program will accompany the exhibition and address global and local topics. Together with representatives from different disciplines, questions about possibilities for living together in the present and future will be explored and new social configurations will be developed.

Artists a.o.: Kai Althoff, Sven Augustijnen, Tina Barney, Cana Bilir-Meier, Mohamed Bourouissa, Brenda Draney, Aslan Gaisumov, Goshka Macuga, Renzo Martens, August Sander, Jeremy Shaw, Rosemarie Trockel, Willem de Rooij

Curator: Nicolaus Schafhausen

Curatorial assistance: Juliane Bischoff

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