Jardin d’Hiver #2
Poems of Change

Curated by Simon Würsten Marin, the second iteration of Jardin d’Hiver (Winter Garden), the biennial show devoted to the region’s contemporary art scene, will explore questions of change, instability, and vulnerability, while showcasing the variety seen throughout the artists’ modes of expression.

Poems of Change borrows its title from a sound piece created by the American composer and pioneer of electronic music Pauline Oliveros. Written thirty years ago, this poem gives voice to an urgent demand for change vis-à-vis the multiple injustices and evils – wars, sexism, racism, environmental crisis – that our world faced and is still facing.
The show offers us an insight into the rich variety of the regional cultural scene through a dozen new commissioned works, each a response to the poem freely shaped around the notions of change, transformation, transition, and development. And serving as the show’s backdrop are two questions: How to make art in a reality that is in constant transformation and characterized by instability and the absence of certainties? And is art – must it be – a witness to or vector of change?
The show Poems of Change presents an overview of an art scene that is itself rapidly changing. By focusing on a generation that more or less shares the same age as the poem at its heart, Poems of Change celebrates the novel involvement, sensibility, and creativity with which the artists of today speak of and question the chaos of our age. Finally, the exhibition wants to make plain that a cultural scene is above all a space for sharing and working together, not only between artists, but likewise between numerous roles and professions that are active side by side, cooperating and together embodying that change.

Curator of the exhibition: Simon Würsten Marin