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ARKEN’s director Christian Gether on UTOPIA:

The idea of UTOPIA, as suggested by the title, is to raise the question of which perceptions it is that drive us people and the world today. A year ago we found the question relevant precisely because it was difficult to see what really meant something in the period of affluence and welfare we found ourselves in. Was the good life merely a question of material success, was welfare about individual satisfaction? What had happened to the utopia? What had happened to the dream of the best of possible worlds? These were the questions we wished to raise with the project and with art as point of departures. We still do. But today they have been given an utterly different context. Financial crisis and recession simply make them more topical and pressing.

In a sense we are forced to consider whether the society we live in is as we want it to be. When we ask today: What do you dream of, the obvious answer is no longer new designer furniture, a gorgeous bathroom, a summer cottage by the sea, or the like. Now it is time for change, as the newly elected president of the US, Barack Obama, has championed. But change to what? What better world are we dreaming of today? With the UTOPIA exhibitions we wish to open up to deliberations and dialogues over these issues.

Now some people may raise the objection that art is not the most obvious arena to discuss utopias. These after all deal with society, politics … But quite the contrary: Pictorial art and the utopia have a long shared history which reaches all the way back to the paradisiacal depictions of the Middle Ages and the ideal cities of the Renaissance. And in the artistic avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century, art was closely linked to a desire for political change. In fact they regarded art as the driving force to actively realise the utopia. A perception which was seen again in the political and cultural upheaval of the 1960s and ‘70s.

The revolutionary power of art and the validity of the great absolute solutions that traditionally have been associated with the utopia have since that period been questioned.

Today the utopia resurfaces in art, but in a more open and questioning form. Art offers no concrete explications of the society of the future but invites us to reflect on our reality. This is manifest in the Chinese Qiu Anxiong, the artist in the first UTOPIA exhibition. In his poetic and moving works he explores various views on society and the challenges we are facing. He utilises art’s special mixture of fiction and reality to let us look at society from new perspectives. And thus develop dreams of a better world.

Any good work of art always has immanent utopian aspirations. Through art we can renew our knowledge of the world, and its potential to interpret and retell is closely connected to the notion that our reality just might look different.