How to Tread Lightly: st_age expanded, an exhibition

How to Tread Lightly. st_age expanded, an exhibition reframes the challenges raised by the Covid-19 crisis in terms of supporting artistic practice. It not only asks how commissioning can be developed in a more caring and meaningful manner, but demonstrates how it can adapt to emerging scenarios. The exhibition is a physical- world extension of the artists’ projects currently being presented during Season 1 of st_age, an online commissions initiative launched in September 2020 by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21).

The newly produced works both for st_age and How to Tread Lightly explore ways in which we can re-situate ourselves in the current context to imagine possible futures. The works in the show pay special attention to environmental concerns and the recovery of ancestral forms of knowledge as means of generating more deeply- rooted understanding about the planet. This exhibition is a call for change and action.

st_age is a new initiative that TBA21 has conceived and produced in an effort to mitigate against cultural loss caused by the enduring Covid-19 pandemic. Its impact is affecting artists and curators and all practitioners from independent organizations, all the way up to national museums. There has never been a more important time for us to link hands and defend a culture of care. I have always believed in cultural diplomacy, ever since my father opened up his collection to Soviet museums at the height of the Cold War in an effort to bring peace to the world. That ambition may well have felt far-fetched at the time, as the US and the USSR were on a nuclear collision course. But today we are on another collision course which does not even have a clear front line. The balance of power is unclear and intellectual freedom, as well as social and environmental justice, is more evasive than ever. I also fundamentally believe that art can bring us hope and the courage to create a unified spirit of resistance, in the knowledge that we are on the right side of history.
Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, Founder and Chairwoman of TBA21