Robert Lucander moved from Finland to Berlin one year before the Wall fell. The prospect of reunification peaked interest in the other side. Differences between east and west became clear. The painter realized, to his own surprise and fascination, that the discourse over various cultural shadings was not simply metaphorical rhetoric, but rather a very real detail that needed to be taken seriously: Lucander ordered industrially produced, color-standardized acrylic lacquer that had been produced in the east. In comparison to the same western version of the product, it exhibited an amazingly different quality of color.

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The experience of limiting the artistic material to cultural characteristics strengthened Lucander’s interest in a force of expression which does not only result from the creative act of the artist, but which lies within the given material already. He begins by investigating the material as a medium with temporal, more »

The work of the Italian artist Christian Niccoli traces the social mental state of the urban beings of our time. The discourse is over a generation of young adults who have fled their country roots, who have been trained to fight their way through life alone, who are always ready to do their best, but who are secretly oppressed by the question of who will take care of them if something goes wrong.

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What is common to them is also what sets them apart. The isolation of those whose existence is based on flexibility and openness, which even though they share with others, does not unite them with others, and in the end only puts them in a position in which they are compared with and played off one another. more »

In 1771, Louis Sébastien Mercier published the novel 2440, which depicts an utopia of a convenient, more ideal, distant future world. Utopias had already existed in the past. However, in Mercier’s utopia, the ideal world is not stumbled upon – for example, through a storm in which one is shipwrecked and washed up onto the shore of the ideal place – but rather a result of a linear history that is played out through human action.

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“Some were immediately enlightened from the beginning, but the majority of the nation was still careless and childlike. Gradually, the population became more intelligent. We still have much more to accomplish than what we have created so far. We are only halfway there,” according to the caretakers of the future regarding the intermediate conditions of the half-realized utopia. Mercier’s narration of the gradual realization of an ideal world carried out by mankind is a modern vision – with human capital, reason, and faith, as applied to technical, rational progress, as its focal points. more »