Virtuele tentoonstelling
Everything Is New
Met o.a. Dora Đurkesac: Garden Manifesto
Everything Is New
Everything is New focuses on change in today's arts infrastructure. Starting at the time of the global pandemic and lockdown with an exploration of the art scene in the Netherlands, the project expands beyond a single locality and looks at the state of urgency in which institutions and practitioners have found themselves globally. The scope of structural changes happening at this very moment – the universal shift towards remote work environments, institutional and independent programming in the arts being digitized, efforts towards rethinking financial sustainability and mechanisms of care for the cultural sector – all seem to be not only a symptom of the unusual times we happen to live in, but are indicative of the excessive rigidity of the arts infrastructure, which has kept its main characteristics unchanged since the first wave of institutional critique in the 1960-70's.It is during this time of emergency that change becomes an urgent and practical task with a pressing deadline. Everything Is New aims at mapping structural change in the arts by examining growing pains and struggles on the one side, moments of ease and advancement on the other – all through the lens of the long-term health crisis we are experiencing now and will be affected by in the foreseeable future.
Conceived as a means of navigating through the multiplicity of structural changes in today's art institutions, this project takes the form of a digital exhibition and online publication consisting of commissioned essays and interviews, complemented by artists' interventions.
One part of this online exhibition concept is the interactive web space Garden Manifesto by the Berlin-based artist Dora Đurkesac.
Dora Đurkesac: Garden Manifesto
Garden Manifesto gathers visions on the future of art practice presented in the form of a collective digital garden. Dora Đurkesac invites artists to contribute to the garden with a choice of a natural element and a reflection in the form of a text, audio recording, video or any other. It is collaborative poetry mixed with contemplative drawings of a garden, creating inspiring metaphors to think about our relation to nature, art, and creation as essential to our everyday experience. Similar to artists’ manifestos, occurring at the turning points of cultural development, these reflections are inevitably tackling a wider position of art production. In the current times of dramatic changes everyone is encouraged to contemplate our ways of being – personal and collective.In order to invent new systems, it is necessary to devote time to understand how to act, create conditions for silence, and slow down the usual pace. A virtual garden is a mysterious, exploratory place slowly built through the imagination of alternative realities.
Garden Manifesto comes in the form of a website consisting of illustrations of garden elements and sounds intertwined with texts. It is opened to new contributions for an indefinite period of time for the purpose of following the changes in personal and collective awareness.
I.s.m. De Appel – Centre for Contemporary Art.