Curated by Rein Wolfs

Europe is currently being shaken by a socioeconomic crisis—one that is both the product of and the justification for privatization on a massive scale. The European public’s reaction—or the almost complete lack thereof—suggests that their sense of the res publica has greatly diminished. Against this, curator Rein Wolfs posits the emergence of a “New Public,” expressions of which he identifies in recent work by fourteen artists, including Juliette Blightman, Christian Jankowski, Erik van Lieshout, Helen Marten, Danh Vo, and the Dutch research studio Metahaven. With this hypothesis—fleshed out and contextualized in the accompanying catalogue by Federico Campagna, Maria Lind, and himself—Wolfs sets the stakes high, and the fact that the show is taking place in a publicly funded institution may help convey just how real those stakes are.

— Jakob Schillinger