Kaunas / Kristiansand / Aveiro 2016

GROUP SHOW@ Meno Forma Galerija (Kaunas/Lithuania) June 2016
@ Ekserserhuset (Kristiansand/Norway) August 2016
@ museum of Aveiro (Aveiro/Portugal) October 2016

If we think of contemporary art as a social system – an idea coined by Niklas Luhmann (1992) putting the arts in the realm of perception -,we locate art in what it does at its best: showing possible realities, through a critical observation, of the world we live in, at social, economical and political levels. It is precisely in this idea that the history of the collective exhibition Notes on Tomorrow unfolds.  The characters (the works) of this story come together in a series of dichotomies. Firstly, the large in conflict with the small; on the other hand, the visual formalisation of the contrasts between History, fiction and memories; the relationship between the observer and the observed; contemplation and creation; networks of information, stories and seemingly random events; and, finally, the contradiction between known and unknown, translated by the desire to discover, to change to something beyond the horizon and, paradoxically, the need for familiar refuges. These dichotomies are not about presenting definitive answers for contemporary society’s challenges but more about looking into a series of questions, observations and experimentations. In this way, these representations reflect the ambivalence of human relations. In other words, it is about visually translating small utopia’s at local levels through inventions, desires and propositions. Notes on Tomorrow comes in a series of twenty-one voices from different European cities (Arad, Aveiro, Genoa, Harghita County, Kaunas, Kristiansand, Lecce, Pardubice, Valladolid, Vilnius, and Zagreb) to dwell on possible perceptions about current social issues and includes installations, drawings, texts, diagrams, videos, photographs and different kinds of situations. 

– Luísa Santos

last two photos by Stefano Bucciero