Everything will be fine

Featuring three art exhibitions, events and performances, the Art Program Everything will be fine focuses on the role of art as a research practice exchanging with the search process of sustainability.

Featuring: Roman Ondak (Slovakia) , David Haley (UK), Aviva Rahmani (USA), Hans Abbing (Netherlands), Jokinen (Germany), Eleonore Straub (Germany), Karen Heald (UK), Personal Cinema (Greece), Jane Marsching (USA), the students of the CCC-Program of the Geneva art academy (Switzerland), Pascal de Lavergne (France), Karen Frostig (USA) and Aziz Baako (Ghana).

Curated by Sacha Kagan (ESA Arts organizing committee) and Bettina Steinbrügge (Halle für Kunst).

Reichenbachstr. 2, Lüneburg

Wednesday to Sunday: 14:00-18:00

Scharnhorststr.1, Halle 25, Lüneburg

Thursday to Saturday: 16:00-19:00 and also Wednesday March 28^th (14:00-18:00) and Sunday April 1st (11:00-15:00)

A posters exhibition is taking place on the ESA Arts conference location during the conference, and in the lobby of the central University library (campus Scharnhorststr.) from April 3^rd onwards.

The Art Program Everything will be fine is co-organized by the organizing committee of the ESA Arts conference and by the Halle für Kunst Lüneburg.

The posters exhibition receives also the support of Studentenwerk Braunschweig.

Special art program at the ESA Arts Conference:

On the week of the ESA Art Conference, a series of special events will be programmed at various locations in Lüneburg with paper presentations, performances and visits to the art exhibitions. See the following program page for details.

18:00 Opening of the exhibition at the Halle für Kunst

Performance-installation by 2 students of The destiny of species: the writing on the wall (David Haley)

Place: Halle fuer Kunst Lüneburg (Reichenbachstr. 2)

Place: Conference location (campus Rotes Feld, room >…<)

10:00 – 11:30 Presentations: Eleonore Straub; Jokinen; Siamak G. Shahneshin

Visit: Posters from the Shrinkage Awards (Shahneshin Foundation), from the CCC program (Geneva art academy) and from Jane Marsching’s Arctic Listening Post

Place: Conference location (campus Rotes Feld, room >…<)

11:30 – 12: 15 Coffee Break and Travel to Kunstraum (campus Scharnhorststr.)

12:15 – 13:00 Performance by Aziz Baako: Tears of the dead and dying specie

With Everything will be fine, an exchange platform is open between sustainability as a change process and art as social inquiry. While the exhibition at the Halle für Kunst deals with the macro-social field of the political, the exhibition at the Kunstraum operates a close-up on the micro-social level of the western human being:

The exhibition at the Halle für Kunst of Lüneburg engages into some of the difficult political, social and ecological challenges that characterize the macro-social level of globalization.

In the face of the challenges of globalization: an ethics of sustainability

Since 9/11, the event horizon is acutely tainted by the specter of armed conflict. However, the most recent outbursts of war have their breeding ground in a history of violence with the European battleground of the Balkans, the Shoah, the Israel/Palestine conflict and the colonial past of Europe. The geopolitical context is but only one of the major difficulties faced in the age of globalization: The global ecological crisis is another major challenge, no less threatening to the very existence of humanity, that is being addressed specifically by the exhibition Everything will be fine.

Facing the global reality of unsustainability, the exhibition at the Halle für Kunst takes a definitely ethical perspective. We call forward a return to ethics in art, based more specifically on the search for an ethics of sustainability.

An ethics of sustainability, if it can be summarized in only one sentence, would point at the following imperative: It calls forward a way of life that does not threaten other ways of life.

Besides, Sustainability as a change process provides artists with a laboratory for intervention in society. The concept of sustainability draws an exploratory space for integrated and comprehensive social change, towards more economic and social justice, more peaceful coexistence (with intercultural interaction and gender equality) and towards a human system that manages its relationships to its environment in a more harmonious way: i.e. a system that adapts to its environment instead of forcing its environment to adapt to itself. Sustainability allows to conceptualize human society as a complex “auto-eco-organisation” (Edgar Morin).

The inquiries of the selected artists address three major issues: the culture of war, the ecological crisis and contemporary socialities. These major issues have to be addressed, in order to unearth the parameters of the contemporary culture of unsustainability and to open the path for an ethical search process of sustainability.

Roman Ondak, Announcement (2002)

Art as a social inquiry into the Western individual

The exhibition confronts several analyzes of individual behavior characterizing western lifestyles.

It offers examples of artistic inquiry as a form of research that comes close to the practice of social sciences.

It reveals the western culture of individualism as a culture of unsustainability.

Art as social inquiry explores, analyzes, and experiments on social reality with an approach that can combine insights and methods from the social sciences with specific tools and sensibilities more traditionally associated to the 'more than rational' potential of artistic work.

Karen Heald, Dr Jenny Hislop and Chris Bird-Jones : Pillow (in between dreams) (2007)

Art as inquiry can play the role of an innovative and resourceful partner for the social sciences. The artists presented in the Kunstraum build upon this potential. Their inquiries elaborate a portrait of the western individual subject where empathic understanding allows a deeper unveiling of embodied social structures, fabricated representations and communicative interactions supporting a culture of unsustainability. As Europe increasingly turns into a fortress of wealth, neither individualism nor its social networks can wipe out the rampant malaise generated by the confrontation to the realities of globalization.

Posters at the conference location

Jane D. Marsching : Arctic Then: Mike supervising Naomi building an umiak, Austfonna Glacier, Svalbard, Norway, 2006

The posters exhibition presents a selection of art and graphic design practices as proactive discourses advancing an ethics of sustainability (posters from the students at the Postgraduate Study Programme CCC, Geneva University of Art and Design), mobilizing awareness on climate change (Jane Marsching: Arctic Listening Post) and proposing particular understandings of sustainability (Shrinkage Awards posters proposed by the Shahneshin Foundation).