Disturbing Narratives presents over 30 artists from Europe, Asia, Africa and North & South America who are working with completely different visual languages and media: spanning painting, drawing, photography, video, sculpture and installation. In the process of selecting artworks in accordance with the theme and the subject matter of Disturbing Narratives, the autonomy of each work of art has been maximally respected in relation to their presentation within the context of the thematic exhibition as a total work of art. A work of art does not serve to illustrate, but rather to generate new meanings, create new associations, and sensitize our relation to the sphere of human experience that it incorporates. The exhibition reflects empathy, sensibility, imaginative richness and radically freed phantasy, in which the artists of our days are approaching the unlimited complexity of life and history.

The artists don’t tell us anecdotes, they are not “story-tellers” – they create poetically powerful, deeply touching, often enigmatic, mysterious, dramatic metaphors, which reveal the disturbing perspectives and frightening darkness behind the surface of normality. At the same time, the artist’s works manifest hope and empathy, the liberating power of consciousness of the “real”, the enthusiastic value of the truth. In this sense, all the unusual and disturbing images, all the surprising, strange, extremely vivid, almost aggressive, burning and torturing, profoundly de-stabilizing moments and irritating shapes of improbability and uncertainty work like liberation, they take us back to ourselves, show us the deep, often hidden roads, which are directing us to the “real”. 

Participating artists: Radu Belcin, Anya Belyat-Giunta, Candice Breitz, Guglielmo Castelli, Chen Chieh-Jen, Chun Sungmyung, Per Dybvig, Erró, Andrea Fogli, Gloria Friedmann, Daniele Galliano, Kendell Geers, Paolo Grassino, Gary Hill, William Kentridge, Nina Kovacheva, Urs Lüthi, Eric Manigaud, Peter Martensen, Andrei Molodkin, Hermann Nitsch, Orlan, Flavia Pitis, Bernardí Roig, Olga Tobleruts, Barthélémy Toguo, Rosemarie Trockel, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, Tinus Vermeersch, Fabien Verschaere, Wang Yuping, Lois Weinberger, Yoo Geun-Taek

Sculpture in 2 Pieces, 2018, Urs Lüthi. Image courtesy of the artist