NEW ENERGIES – WHERE EUROPE BEGINS

A retrospective on the E.ON Foundation Art Talks & Walks at ART Düsseldorf.

Art fairs are places of encounter. They bring galleries, artists, collectors, and institutions together. At the same time, they are places where the questions of our time come into sharp focus. With the E.ON Foundation Art Talks & Walks, ART Düsseldorf became a platform for exchange, perspectives, and social dialogue for three days.

Under the title New Energies, the programme was dedicated to topics that move art and society alike: the social responsibility of art and culture, Europe as a shared cultural space of experience, and the challenges of transformation and sustainability within the art system.

The three contributions below take up these conversations — not as minutes, but as approaches. They carry forward the central ideas of the discussions and make visible what impulses emerged from the conversations.

The programme was made possible by the E.ON Foundation. Talks and thematically curated Art Walks directly connected social questions with the artistic positions presented at the fair and made dialogue tangible right in front of the works.

Because an art fair is more than a marketplace. It is a place where ideas are born, positions meet, and new perspectives are opened. The E.ON Foundation Art Talks & Walks see themselves as a contribution to this dialogue — beyond the days of the fair as well.

Saturday brought together three rounds on East and West, belonging and censorship. A record of voices, not of resolutions.

I. Ruins

It begins with a question built like a trap: is the interest in GDR art a hype or a long-overdue revision? Renate Goldmann, who oversees the estate of Sarah Schumann, recalls the years after the fall of the Wall as a time when spaces suddenly opened up on both sides. Katharina Neuburger of the Ludwig Foundation points to the cultural-political intention of the Ludwig Collection — to include East German positions early on, at a time when doing so still met with resistance.

The real driving force, all three agree, is a generational shift. Those who never experienced the GDR view its art without the ideological label — and discover affinities between East and West where earlier perspectives saw only rupture. The exchange before 1989, it is recalled, rarely ran through official state structures anyway. It ran through grey zones, private networks, individual bridge-builders: collectors like the Ludwig couple, galleries that smuggled art across the border because someone personally wanted it.

Then an example surfaces that undermines the nostalgia. The planned Frank Stella museum in Dresden — abandoned because Premier Biedenkopf disliked the art. Stefan Schmidtke calls it his “first bad experience with democracy.” A personal aesthetic judgement killed a major project and damaged the city’s international reputation. The round does not get stuck in the celebration of what has been rediscovered. It shows that the ruins of history are also democratic ruins.

II. Position

The second round asks the question directly: where does Europe begin, where does it end? Mark Terkessidis, author and migration researcher, offers the sharpest image of the day. The major cultural institutions, he says, are like “lumbering tankers” — they are aware of the necessity of diversification and yet remain stuck in old structures, blind to the reality of a society that has long been shaped by migration.

Markus Ambach responds, but not as a contradiction — more as a further turn of the dial. In large parts of the world, art is not an isolated object for the market but an “agitator” within social structures. The European art world must learn to accept this outside perspective rather than mirroring itself in its own specialist discourse.

The decisive shift, however, comes from Farzane Vaziritabar. She challenges the very framework in which migration and art are discussed — the “discourse of foreignness.” It is a trap, she argues: it reduces artists to their origins, even in the very moment of ostensible welcome. The issue is not foreignness, she says, but position — and the place from which one works, visibility in public space, belonging as a fact rather than as a favour. With that, the panel’s question suddenly stands differently in the room. Europe does not begin at a geographical border. It begins where one stops treating one’s own perspective as the centre.

III. The Scissors in the Mind

The final round is the darkest. Lars Hendrik Beger of Deutschlandfunk describes a dispiriting atmosphere: artists and authors were already avoiding controversial subjects at the funding application stage, out of fear of stigmatisation or losing support. “The scissors in the mind,” he says, “are already there.” Censorship no longer needs to come from outside; it has made itself at home.

Georg Schöllhammer and Ivor Stodolsky trace where this can lead. In Hungary and Russia, they warn, ideological cultural policies have been established through parallel structures — foundations, think tanks — that hollow out liberal institutions from within. Stodolsky, who protects endangered artists through Artist at Risk, speaks from experience of how quickly rhetorical pressure becomes real persecution.

One word is taken apart: “the centre.” The formula of “strengthening the centre,” the round concludes, is rarely neutral. It often serves to legitimise interference in artistic freedom — as if the centre were a fixed place that politics may administer. But it is the opposite: a pluralist space that resists definition. Whoever defines it has already narrowed it.

And yet this day, too, does not end in fatalism. From the pressure, the consensus holds, a particular energy emerges — an anger that gives strength, an unconditional will to carry on. But resilience alone is not enough. It sustains what exists; it does not envision anything new.

The last word therefore belongs once more to Ivor Stodolsky, and it is not an answer but a condition: “If we as Europe do not have some kind of dream of the future, some kind of idea, vision, something new, then we will always have to look back to the past.”

Three rounds, one arc: from the ruins of a divided history, through the question of who belongs, to a freedom that does not defend itself on its own. What was not formulated on this Saturday was the dream of the future itself. Perhaps that was honest. One can keep the space for it open — it cannot yet be described.