Fellow Travellers. Art as a tool to change the world

Press Release

With the exhibition project “Fellow Travellers”, the concept of art of Alistair Hudson, the new scientific-artistic director of ZKM since April 2023, becomes visible for the first time. Hudson sees art as a social practice. In the exhibition format, “Fellow Travellers” shows a variety of artistic positions of this notion of socially useful art, including projects by the Chinese artist Zheng Guogu, the Brazilian architect Paulo Tavares / studio autônoma and the Congolese collective CATPC. With the “Useum”, the exhibition expands to include an open space that creates a place for joint social action in an artistic context for initiatives from Karlsruhe.

In his concept of the “useful museum”, Alistair Hudson sees art institutions as places for social responsibility and change and defines artistic and curatorial practice as social practice. With the “Fellow Travellers” project, he and his curatorial team are giving this approach a visible platform. On display are projects from various regions of the world that operate on the basis of real living conditions.

The following five projects occupy a key position: “Liao Garden” by Chinese artist Zheng Guogu is a landscape project in the Chinese provincial town of Yangjiang that shows how technology can be combined with rituals, mysticism and nature to open up new perspectives on living together. From Brazil, the “Forest Pavilion” project by architect Paulo Tavares / studio autônoma is represented, resituating architecture as a decolonial practice in cooperation with indigenous groups of the Amazon region. The collective CATPC (Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise) from the Democratic Republic of Congo will be showing their NFT-project piggy-backing the art market and digital technology to improve local living conditions. CATPC has just been honored with the Grand Prize of the S+T+Arts Prize Africa '24 at Ars Electronica 2024. Natalia Romik and Kuba Szreder from Europe are represented with their rolling project “Matters of Evidence”, examining visual technologies and tactics of evidence in order to create counter-publicity. “Common Grounds” is a collaboration between two local initiatives – the Bio Design Lab of HfG Karlsruhe and the ZKM Orchard – exploring biophilic processes and non-human perspectives on our ecosystems.

Works by the following artists will also be on display: Jean Painlevé (FR), Tim Otto Roth (DE), Catalina Ossa Holmgren and Enrique Rivera (CL).

Alistair Hudson on the journey: "‘Fellow Travellers’ shows projects in which art is understood as a process of changing the everyday. All projects were developed interlocally, i.e. on site with the people living there. This is the only way for art to emerge from its traditional representation into genuine future action. The individualization of technological progress helps here. Digital media have long been locally distributed and accessible worldwide."

The “Useum” is integrated into the exhibition as an open space for individual and collective initiatives from Karlsruhe and the region. At monthly meetings and via e-mail, there will be the opportunity to propose communities (contact: useum.anfrage@zkm.de). In the “Useum”, ZKM is also showing a selection of projects from the archive of the Asociación Arte Útil, which Alistair Hudson founded together with the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera and researchers Alessandra Saviotti and Gemma Medina, following the exhibition "Museum of Arte Útil" at the Van Abbemuseum in 2013. The archive collects and disseminates projects worldwide that use artistic tactics and strategies as instruments for social, ecological or economic change.