GROUND is a one-day festival for ground-breaking art, knowledge, design and music.
On Saturday, March 17, 2018, more than 40 artists, thinkers, designers and musicians from the Netherlands and abroad will be guests in The Hague. The program is a combination of theater, lectures, debates, film, concerts and exhibitions.
A number of acts, installations and performances have been made especially for the festival, some guests are in the Netherlands for the first time.
Welcome to Interesting Times!
Artists Perspectives on Challenging Issues
Historically – according to the philosopher Slavoj Žižek – ‘interesting times’ can be considered periods of unrest, war and power struggles, with their consequences being borne by millions of innocent victims. Today, the world seems to be going through interesting times again with all the tensions and insecurities that abound.
How to act? As victim, as perpetrator? Apathetic or on the contrary revolutionary? How does an artist imagine when traditional answers are no longer sufficient? Anyway GROUND believes that art offers the imagination and can serve as ‘a hammer to shape reality’ (Bertolt Brecht). Shaking up its environment, giving it a ‘voice’, redefining, fusing or engaging inside and outside the art world. Artists thinking of alternatives, not avoiding the points of pain in current events, and initiating dialogues on societal and political issues which could resemble methods and forms of art and activism.
In this context GROUND underlined the autonomy and philosophy of ‘leading life instead of submitting to it’. Art as a force for justice and equality, as a means to change the world and make it a better place. We must remember that since the arrival of the internet, such issues have become global, and can be brought to people’s attention and in the media by individuals.
