Responsive Art: COLLECTIVE

Art has often been associated with controversy. Especially since the second half of the nineteenth century and strongly throughout the twentieth, many artists and movements have concentrated their efforts on breaking and denying previous canons, as well as social and cultural conventions.

But there is a type of art that is especially focused on the call for attention, on taking sides and standing in opposition to what is established. They are works of a political nature or with a marked interest in social, economic and contemporary issues, on which they invite reflection and debate.

We certainly live in a time of crisis. All the great institutions are being questioned and the shared certainties on which our social and coexistence systems had been built seem to be diminishing. There are crises in national states, political institutions and economic systems; crisis in educational systems and religious institutions; migration, displacement and refugee crisis; crisis in the way we conceive of identities and the exercise of rights. Everything changes quickly, nothing seems entirely real, nor final.

Against this background, art has something to say. Artists, as witness and interpreters of their time, reflect from their position and try to open paths or at least pose questions and dilemmas. Some opt for frontal criticism and others for the doubt that posts questions, but none is indifferent to the new realities.

We have put together a sample of these artists, who answer, who question, who polemicize, with the purpose of continuing to open spaces for reflection and thought through art.