CURRENT – ART AND PUBLIC SPACE

CURRENT is a transdisciplinary festival for art in urban space and will take place in Stuttgart in September 2021. The first edition is dedicated to Porosity in – and of the City. Within the festival, the artists name gaps in city planning as well as gaps in the collective consciousness, advocate productive approaches to crises and unpredictability and recognize improvisation as a potential for design. Installations, performances, discussions and workshops negotiate the connections of art, with architecture and the city. The artists will engage with specific situations in the urban sphere through different formats, directly or indirectly: as possibilities, materials, co-existences, promises and assertions, forms of surveillance, as well as new forms of perception in the urban sphere.

As an occasion to discuss new programs for art in the context of the city, the symposium will take place on September 16 and 17 in cooperation with the Kunstverein Wagenhalle e.V. and will bring together experts from various fields of experience and knowledge as well as local partners and institutions that deal with questions of a multi-voiced and forward-looking urban design.

What is the contribution and role of art and culture to the expressiveness and resilience of an urban society? How can art be considered in urban planning processes, especially without being attributed a direct function? CURRENT understands the artistic engagement with the urban as an important resonance space and wants to put new models, formats, strategies and financing structures up for discussion.

The festival is composed of the exhibition from 9-19 September 2021 in Stuttgart, local cooperations, an accompanying magazine, and discourse formats with a symposium on September 16 and 17 at Kunstverein Wagenhalle.

CURRENT – ART AND PUBLIC SPACE is a project of the Art Public Space – Culture Matters gUG, supported by the City of Stuttgart, the Baden-Württemberg Foundation, the Wüstenrot Foundation, the ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen), the LBBW Foundation and the Kingdom of the Netherlands.