New Narratives! How to make Art when the World is Burning?

What role can art play in times of crises? How can artists still claim to be relevant to systems when these systems are collapsing? How can art rise to the current challenges?  How can artists reimagine how we see, think, feel, and act? Which new narratives and images realized through art, gesture, sound, or space can help us to envision what could happen?

 

To make these questions more concrete, we’re setting ourselves the goal of producing images and narratives for the present that are more adequate than the clichéd representations that dominate everywhere (blue, sexualized female robots for AI; shrinking glaciers for climate change; burning cars for protests…). This is what we’ll focus on this semester: to bring these works together on an online platform and present them at the Angewandte Festival.

This seminar invites you to engage directly and unapologetically with the urgencies of the present. Rather than defaulting to ironic distance, academic gestures, or elitist references to art history, this course encourages students to ask: What matters most to me now? What’s at stake? What kind of world do I want to live in – and how can I make art that speaks to it? 

It's a seminar for all those that are worried about the state of the world, but also about the state of the art world and who wonder, how they might create work that is perceived beyond a narrow elite of artists, connoisseurs, and peers.  

Are not many of the artists of the past whom I value the most  artists who did more than making elitist gestures for peers and wealthy patrons?  When Francisco Goya created The Disasters of War, he didn’t idealize resistance. He instead showed the horror, absurdity, and brutality of violence as it impacts human bodies and souls. When George Grosz caricatured the ruling class of Weimar Germany, he exposed the grotesque alliance of power, corruption, and cruelty. And Käthe Kollwitz’s unflinching portrayals of war, hunger, and loss became powerful symbols of resistance and human dignity, widely circulated in anti-war and labor movements, and continuing to influence socially engaged artists to this day.

While some artists created palace decorations or performed for the bourgeois avant-garde, others responded to the crises of their time, creating great art despite and because of their activism. Today, we face our own: ecological collapse, rising authoritarianism, widening inequality, algorithmic mind control, and the erosion of democratic and planetary futures. Some call it the Anthropocene, others the Capitalocene, or even the Pyrocene, because,  the world is burning literally and metaphorically.

Each student will choose the issue they feel most urgent about – whether ecological, political, personal, or systemic and explore how artistic practice might contribute to better futures.  We will discuss the limits and potentials of narrative (visual, poetic, activist, speculative), and support each other in developing individual or collaborative works that are not only critical, but also imaginative and engaged.  

To inform our discussions, we will look at historical works  from Francisco Goya, Käthe Kollwitz, George Grosz or Tarsila do Amaral, whose Estratosfera (1947) places a fragile, human form between looming machines and crushed by thick smoke, like a soul suspended in the ruins of modernity. And we will consider artists like Adrian Piper, whose conceptual rigor and embodied performance art challenged racism, sexism, and constantly crosses the boundaries between art and life.

Each of these offer visions shaped by the fires of their time. We will als attend a series of public talks by invited guest artists as part of the course. Each work at the intersection of art and activism, often addressing ecological and political urgencies. These talks will take place on Monday evenings at Depot – Kunst und Diskussion and will offer further perspectives on how art can intervene in the present and help shape new imaginaries. So please make sure to also be available on these dates.

The course is open to students from all disciplines. Formats may include installation, text, drawing, performance, video, sound, or hybrid forms – so long as they aim to confront the world as it is, and as it could be. In order to validate the course fully and obtain the corresponding ECTS points, you will have to attend at least 80% of the classes, as well as follow along with the exercises and a final project (draft). 

 

 

The course is open to students from all disciplines. Formats may include installation, text, drawing, performance, video, sound, or hybrid forms—so long as they aim to confront the world as it is, and as it could be. In order to validate the course fully and obtain the corresponding ECTS points, you will have to attend at least 80% of the classes (12/15) - unless properly excused, as well as follow along with the exercises and a final project (draft). 

 

There are public talks with invited artists that are part of the seminar. Please make sure that you keep those evenings free!