However, we live in times when news burst over us in our private space, through the newest technologies of communication, and the world today confronts with a series of successive crisis, feeding the news, so this saying seems to be more a wished state of being, rather than one we really live.
In short, today, in 2017, whether we talk about someone poor, a middle-class person, someone uninvolved politically or an activist, what happens around us, politically, socially, or historically, not only it seems to concern us directly, but also demands from us, almost continuously, a reaction or a clear position.
Beyond the peace the saying from the title describes, we are today, as a global society, in a permanent state of anxiety and conflict. In this situation, seeking refuge locally doesn’t bring any solutions. Violent nationalism, xenophobes, racism and the hate for the upper class that the poor population has, but also grave economic and ecological problems are one too many, unfortunately, and too close to us. In cities, towns, in the big geographical regions where we live.
Moreover, after the economic crisis in 2008, the bad news kept coming and eroding thoroughly the peace about which the English saying was speaking. We could say that this democratic order with which the euro-Atlantic states used to pride themselves, which went on for a while after the falling of the Berlin wall, is after 2008 in a continuous state of degradation, and we see it every day.
This general state has a decisive impact over the critical art, because, many times, situations that were signalled in the not so distant past by artists come back not as cultural dilemmas, but as public hysterias in present. The art projects gain in this way a feeling of prophecies, many times disarming. In this context, it is important to underline that not all things presented are recent. And yet, as said by the described reasons above, it is not necessary for them to be new to sometimes be painfully current. In the sense of the title, some of them would be old news. But, as one will see, they are not at all of the past, since old structural problems of society re-appear today and formulate the present.
Beyond the intention to talk about the general state of the world we live in, the ART on Display interventions try to establish a connection with a new public, who usually doesn’t come to art openings, these interventions being thought as a group of contemporary art exhibitions mounted in the showcases around town.