Polar & Tropic

The tropics are imaginary lines drawn across the Earth: invisible thresholds where the sun, at its highest point, seems to pause before reversing its course. Our present seems to inhabit such a threshold: the natural, social, and institutional structures that have sustained a dominant way of producing and relating to one another are now showing their limits, while others begin to emerge and organise from the margins.

The crisis inherent to this transitional state puts the paradigm under strain and intensifies polarisation. In the social realm, the polar implies an inability to inhabit common spaces; in nature, by contrast, it represents a principle of attraction: the tension between poles enables movement, exchange, and the flow of energy.

Within this context, the new edition of Polar and Tropic brings together independent collectives and spaces from the local, Nordic, and Southeast Asian regions that, despite their geographical and sociopolitical distance, articulate networks of collaboration and solidarity.

The programme questions the mechanisms of value that sustain the hegemonic model of contemporary art, in which the object/artwork and the supposed autonomy of the artist operate as forms of accumulation and concentration. The proposals presented shift the emphasis towards the processes and relationships that sustain communities and territories, both within and beyond the circuits of art.

The programme observes how these practices behave when entering an art fair, transforming the system of exchange and the definition of what is considered an object of art. As the market becomes an abstraction for emerging practices and the established system appears to be crumbling, the present moment demands that we imagine and put into practice alternative infrastructures and other ways of producing and relating to one another.