Michael Rakowitz, The Ballad of Special Ops Cody (still), 2017
ARS22—Living Encounters explores the big questions and stories of our time, and creates a space dedicated to shared experiences and community. The exhibition features works by 55 artists or groups from 26 different countries.
Since 1961, the exhibition series ARS has engaged with the most pressing questions defining its time. The tenth edition, ARS22—Living Encounters, deals with the multiple processes of social fragmentation that are endangering life on the planet today.
In addition to its theme, Living Encounters includes two other defining gestures: an emphasis on live practices and the inclusion of the historical. By emphasizing the here and now, participatory and performative proposals underline the museum as a physical space for gathering. The historical works provide a dialogic context for current investigations and positions, highlighting how art has permanently been an arena in which to engage crucial questions of the moment, then and now.
ARS22 designs a choreography of gestures and positions that in their specificity and as a whole offer alternative paths to present-day detachment, disenchantment, isolation, and hopelessness, making visible the mutually dependent dynamics between individual and collective imaginaries both in their continuities and in their ruptures. ARS22—Living Encounters is a gathering that celebrates the intimate, multiple, shared, and dynamic constitution of life on the planet.