The exhibition project “Redraw Tragedy” deals with the artistic handling of serious events, catastrophes and tragedies.

The world is full of extremes, societies are polarised. In a catastrophic situation, limiting the damage to people, environment and society should be the main priority. The actual situation, however, is often muddled, historically prejudiced, dominated by conflicts of interest and opinion. Communication is often hardly possible – this is also shown by the current global crises.

As artists, we are also confronted with serious disasters, tragedies and catastrophes, we work on our attitudes and questions in our artistic work, and in doing so we are actors in social cultures. Can art make visible what is so difficult to grasp in this field of tension? Coming from different backgrounds and places, we open up a space for new perspectives for ourselves and others with a joint exhibition and a digital accompanying programme.

The participating artists have all been working for a long time on themes dealing with catastrophes, momentous events and tragedies. The exhibiting group is not only defined by common exhibition interests, but wants to facilitate a longer-term artistic/content-related exchange about their own work within the group and with interested third parties. The exchange is a central element, the network an organically growing one.

The idea for the exhibition arose during a discussion with artists in Japan. Kobayashi and Wehler found remarkable thematic affinities and parallels in artistic and thematic aspects such as duplication and reproduction, as well as a common interest in the field of tension between history and personal experience.

A first joint exhibition took place with the three artists Tanji, Kobayashi and Wehler in Okayama, Japan, in January 2021. Inspired by the fruitful artistic and content-related discussions, further impulses for networking developed and led to the project idea of a digital programme and exhibition.

In cooperation with the team of the Artists’ Forum, an exhibition has been planned for January and February ’22 in the spacious rooms of the Künstlerforum.

The content is already being built up in the digital space in ’21. The desire is to network further and make this process accessible to the public.

The exhibition will take place in January and February 2022 at the Künstlerforum Bonn.

It will be held in cooperation with Museum Studies at the University of Bonn and is supported by the Sparkassenstiftung and the City of Bonn.