NEW ORDER: On Art and Order in Uncertain Times

Artists: Hartmut Böhm, Monica Bonvicini, Hanne Darboven, Charlotte Eifler, Harun Farocki, Forensic Architecture / Forensic Oceanography, Andreas Gursky, Peter Halley, Barbara Herold, Jenny Holzer, Aleksander Konstantinov, Eva Kot’átková, Alicja Kwade, Sol LeWitt, Vera Molnar, Dan Perjovschi, Lia Perjovschi, Sophia Pompéry, Gabriel Rico, Richard Serra, Katja Strunz, Claudia de la Torre, Timm Ulrichs and Clemens von Wedemeyer

The future seems increasingly unpredictable, the now increasingly elusive. Shaped by climate crises, geopolitical upheavals, new armed conflicts, migratory movements and the effects of a pandemic, world events have escalated into an unsettled present. The apparent stability of the global order seems unbalanced. Most notably, the pandemic crisis has thrown global networks and the unfettered mobility of data, goods, and people into disarray.

Against this backdrop, the notion of order has acquired new significance. Public crisis management is increasingly concerned with “restoring” or “maintaining order.” Creating order is seen as an attempt to make the world comprehensible and controllable. But what do we actually mean when we speak of order? What are the term’s historical and theoretical roots, and in what contexts can it be used today? And is it at all suitable for grasping, let alone shaping, our fluid, ever-evolving contemporary world?

The international group exhibition NEW ORDER tackles these questions by examining the concept of order in its social and aesthetic dimensions. It brings together works by artists from different generations exploring different forms of order. Topics range from scientific and political orders to critical interrogations of power structures and surveillance mechanisms to blueprints for future orders. Based on thematic complexes such as time, territory, technology, institution, algorithm, grammar and body, the show establishes diverse references between different artistic positions.

Common to all works is the examination of order as an ambivalent concept that oscillates between longing, control, and cognition. Hanne Darboven gives the passing of time and the emergence of contemporary history their own structure of order, while Alicja Kwade approaches the order of time through the division of the world into time zones, which follows the rules of political structures as well as physical laws. The spectrum of the exhibition ranges from Claudia de la Torre, who examines the archive of the Museum im Kulturspeicher Würzburg and questions its inherent systems of order, to Harun Farocki. His work In-Formation analyzes stereotypes of identity in the age of migration, which are supposed to serve an objective assignment of people to a group. Andreas Gursky shows the uniformity of flower fields, thus ordering principles of industrialized agriculture. Clemens von Wedemeyer creates speculative scenarios for our future coexistence, which will be increasingly shaped by mathematical hierarchies of artificial intelligence and by algorithms.

NEW ORDER: On Art and Order in Uncertain Times is curated by Luisa Heese and marks the beginning of the artistic program at the Museum im Kulturspeicher from fall 2021 under her direction. The exhibition brings together numerous international loans and new productions especially for this show with works from the Peter C. Ruppert Collection - Concrete Art after 1945 and the Municipal Collection of the Museum im Kulturspeicher.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue and a programme of digital and analogue events.