WORKS OF NEW MEANING

Exhibition platform

Center For New Meaning creates space for creative experimentation and collaboration that seeks to challenge conventional convictions of the planetary and ecological crises including critical-aesthetic reflections on relations between (human) beings, nature, climate and sustainability. In collaboration with The Generous Octopus, we conduct this curatorial practice on our online exhibition platform Works of New Meaning where digital and physical contemporary artworks are featured. 

In our curatorial outset we form a dialogical and interdisciplinary interaction between artists, researchers, learning experts and audience. We believe that this take is urgently necessary, as we understand the ecological and climatic crisis to be, in its essence, an entangled and interdisciplinary crisis, only possible to commit to, if we – through an artistic and curatorial outset – conduct our methods and develop new learning strategies within this interdisciplinary realm. That is why we incorporate artworks into our educational programs on sustainability and the planetary/climate crisis through blended and aesthetic learning experiences (Climate Class & Econatus).

We want to support and facilitate this artistic practice and learning space to enforce an impactful meeting between academic, scientific, pedagogical and affective content in a creative and interdisciplinary dialogue. By doing so, our platform supports a continuous immersion of new artworks, theory, essays, debate as well as ecological and societal critique – all absorbed in a quest to create ‘new meaning’ in light of the current and urgent planetary crisis and worldly reorganization. Through collaborations with various art organizations and individuals, this collective work will in time be documented in our open source archive, Grid of New Meaning; an online toolbox and means of keeping artworks, and the new meaning they produce, alive and available for the appearance of new projects that are yet to come.

WHERE IS WORKS OF NEW MEANING? The short answer is: it’s in the making and will be launched soon!

The Generous Octopus is an allegorical figure representing what the curatorial practice behind Works of New Meaning sets out to do: facilitate a critical space of aesthetic production, contemplation, discussion, experience and collective action in the light of the mentioned crises. It operates in and across the archive Grid of New Meaning. 

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Meaning, seen as a regenerative power, is most powerful when it’s collective, affirmative, open, inclusive. The many arms of the (generous) octopus embrace the many directions of meaning, connecting them in one body with various muscle fiber orientations allowing for a remarkable diversity of movements and deformations.