Exploring Survival in the 21st Century Art Meets Apocalypse
An Interview with curator Georg Diez
The “Survival in the 21st Century” exhibition at Deichtorhallen Hamburg features works by around 40 international artists exploring themes of survival, technology, cultural preservation, and future sustainability. It will be on display from 18 May to 5 November 2024 and includes nearly 100 workshops, lectures, and activities under the “School of Survival” program, aimed at developing strategies for future challenges. The idea is to encourage visitors to rethink assumptions and engage with current issues through art. We spoke to Georg Diez, journalist and author, who curated the exhibition together with Nicolaus Schafhausen as well as the research curators Lena Baumgartner and Frances Fürst.
The exhibition and its artworks explore the foundations of life in the age of the polycrisis. What role did the concept of the apocalypse play in the creation of the exhibition?
We started working on this exhibition around 2019. This was a different time. We were talking about climate change and the sense of an ending, the understanding that life on earth is in danger. But we wanted to see the potential in this moment. How can we change the way we behave, interact, and connect; more concretely:
How can we use other forms of knowledge, like indigenous world views, practices and philosophies to reconceive how we grow food, organize our economies, how we govern? The exhibition was called “Speculations” then, because the future seemed to be open, the future needed to be claimed or reclaimed, we thought, it has been lost as a concept for emancipation and change and we wanted to bring it back.
Along the way, something changed. There was a shift in consciousness, we perceived, mostly in terms of dealing with climate change. The word, in different forms, was adaptation. It was not so much about change anymore, it was about dealing with the fallout. This discourse came into the political sphere through Jem Bendell and his concept of Deep Adaptation, it came into the economic sphere as a lot of business leaders and also politicians openly agreed that we are fucked, so to speak, and need to best deal with it. No more explicit talk about changing the economy in a fundamental way. No more challenge to the status quo. To the contrary, the status quo seemed to be reinforced by the threat of radical changes.
Is this apocalyptic? I am not sure I would use this term, and Nicolaus Schafhausen and I have never used it in any of our conversations. I am not sure that it works for this moment. It has a history which is not ours, a religiously tainted notion of doom, it has a political context which has been taken over, in some part, I would say, by the political right. Can this term be used to create change? This is what I want from terminology, from words: To open up possibilities, not to shut down the process of thinking. What happened is that a sense of ending entered the mainstream. Or rather, the understanding that we live in a continuum of time which bends towards a future which is radically different from the present. Fear is a common reaction to this, as is denial. I am more interested in these human pathologies and not the philosophy of doom.
Humanity is dealing with enormous issues like climate change, wars, and disasters. What exactly inspired you and your team for this exhibition? How did you select the artists and works featured in the exhibition to create a cohesive narrative addressing themes of survival and sustainability?
We talked a lot as a team about how we perceive the changes in the world: What does the understanding of climate change do to the human psyche? What is the potential of indigenous perspectives and where does it become instrumentalized, exotifying, and an excuse not to think more profoundly about the obvious contradictions in our own thinking and systems, politically, economically, technologically, existentially? We sought out artists who share this probing approach to the present, who have a sense of crisis, who see ahead, in some way, without explicitly stating it. Art is not an answer, but art can be a tool.
In light of the exhibition's exploration of survival and sustainability, what concrete actions or changes do you hope to inspire in visitors? What outcomes do you anticipate from the workshops and lectures of the “School of Survival”?
We do think that learning and most importantly unlearning are essential for conceptualizing alternative futures. We as curators do not believe that individual actions will create the necessary change, it needs fundamental systemic transformations to assure human survival. But these systemic changes come about by fostering ideas and concepts that help prepare the more fundamental changes.
You chose to alter the title during the curation process, crossing out 'Survival.' What was the reason behind this change?
We changed the title after discussions with some artists about the war in Gaza and more generally about different notions of Survival – considering that people in the Global South have been asking this question for a lot longer than us in the Global North. The horizontal line is a marker of this history, of this discourse – it is not crossing out Survival as a demand and a concept. It is, graphically, more of an emphasis, a visual sign that something is breaking, that there is a sense of urgency.
How do you make sure that the exhibition does not trigger a sense of hopelessness in the visitors? What do you want visitors to take away from the exhibition?
The last thing we want is to create hopelessness. And this is also not the gesture of the exhibition which we think should serve as a guide for the visitor how to think and live in the 21st century, as a tool, as we often called it, as a method. The exhibition should train a certain mindset which is open to the dangers and challenges and contradictions of our times but also engages art in order to reconceptualize the future in a different way.
The exhibition opens each thematic area with a question. However, the question is not always answered in detail in the description text, and sometimes additional questions are raised, as seen with Thomas Struth's artwork and 'What is Science?'. Why did you choose to use such broad questions without explicitly answering them?
The whole point of questions is sometimes exactly that, no? That they cannot be answered. That there is an openness which creates a space for the audience to fill with their own thoughts, fears, hopes. The questions are broad and big in order to frame the artworks in a discourse that is existential. The artworks themselves don’t need this framing, they are what they are, mostly ambivalent, for sure not providing answers. But for the audience, the need for a narrative, for some sign-post of sensemaking, seemed important for us as curators. The questions form this narrative. We challenge the audience to think big and to think deeply about how they want to live and what world they want to create.