Where will we go from here? Twelve art stories from Spain at the Frankfurter Kunstverein

October 14, 2022–January 29, 2023

As part of the cultural program for the Frankfurt Book Fair 2022, the Frankfurter Kunstverein will open its doors to the Guest of Honour Spain from October 14, 2022, through January 29, 2023.

Where Will We Go From Here? is an exhibition organized by Rosa Ferré and Ana Ara. includes twelve Spanish works, or visual stories, in an exhibition that is themed around a topic that originates from a shared, global setting of uncertainty and that practices multiple responses from a particular geopolitical and cultural context.

We are scarcely able to keep up with the rapid pace of the fundamental changes that are occurring in this third decade of the twenty-first century. We understand that in order to understand the present, we must address the environmental and resource-related issue, which plays a significant role in the context of all other crises, including the war, and significantly influences how societies throughout the world behave. Politics is demonstrating its inability to deal with a reality that is too interconnected and complex and is ruled by automated financial forces. We are in the process of accepting that the world we once knew is no longer there following a worldwide epidemic in the middle of a Europe that is becoming less and less significant. What happened to the Internet’s promise of liberty and technological utopia? We are still a long way from being able to imagine the future as we look for tools to ground us in the new epistemology we will need to adopt. Because the current crisis affects more than just the environment; it also affects worldviews, relationships, language, awareness, and story.

This exhibition intends to examine the function that “fiction” plays in contemporary Spanish creative activity for the creation of imaginaries that aid in the recovery of the present. It aims to provide a journey through the works of some artists in which the fable, the narrative structures derived from stories and myths, have a profound influence on their methods and visual language, proposing stories that challenge the cultural and social constructions, or our ideology, with which we operate.

What will happen next? is a collection of tales that examines the myths that have been told to us and that have brought us to this uncertain present. These tales suggest alternative narratives on the idea of identity—of our own, of the collective—by twisting inherited ideas of progress, recovering ancient fables, looking into the absurd and humor, from autofiction, or seizing the estrangement of science fiction. Is gender identity a myth? The past as fiction? A fabrication, human identity itself?