What does “art as a public affair” mean? What is public? And not least what is the relationship between art and public? These are the three questions that this exhibition, and this book, aspire to explore, with a starting point in Boris Groys’s essay Art in the Age of Democracy. The exhibition and book pivot on the four existential concerns of isolation/loneliness, meaninglessness, freedom and death, as well as their political instrumentalization. These four basic human conditions are examined through different psychological mechanisms, political agendas and existential issues in the light of such concepts as the welfare state, national identity, solidarity, birth, death, totalitarianisms, migration, mass movements, iconoclasms, psychosis, intimacy, embarrassment and shame.

Claus Carstensen (b. 1954) is an artist, curator and author.