ANOTHER SPRING 2018

ANOTHER SPRING
CURATED BY JEAN WAINWRIGHT

2018 is a meaningful year in that it marks the 50th anniversary of the Prague Spring, a moment of great significance in the political liberalisation in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union after World War II.
Part of The Prague Spring reforms granted to the citizens included a loosening of restrictions on the media, speech and travel across borders, initiating the eventual collapse of Soviet hegemony in 1989. On the 9th November 2016, Donald Trump was elected the American President and the Republicans retained the Control of Congress and Senate. On the 23rd June 2017 7.4 million British citizens voted to leave the European Union killing the UK’s membership of the biggest and most prosperous trading bloc in the world. 27 years earlier, on the night of the 9th November 1989, the Berlin Wall came down.

The work of the artists selected for Another Spring bears relation to current trends and broader developments of nationalist impulses in Western society, where the debated question of citizenship, the foundation for identity and political governance is tied to ultranationalist concerns and increased measures to regulate and control the movement of people across borders. The fear of national invasion and the economic erosion by an ‘outsider’ increasingly throws into question whether moving across borders becomes even more difficult in years to come.

In 2018, we are still living in a state of political anxiety: around 3.3million EU nationals currently live in the UK, including nearly 600,000 children whose status has not being legally secured nor has their citizenship status being declared as ”settled”. The work of the artists selected bears relation to current trends and broader developments of nationalist impulses in Western society, where the debated question of citizenship, the foundation for identity and political governance is tied to ultranationalist concerns and increased measures to regulate and control the movement of people across borders. The fear of national invasion and the economic erosion by an ‘outsider’ increasingly throws into question whether moving across borders becomes even more difficult in years to come.

The artists of Another Spring reflect on the current state of our political condition, national identity, immigration, social liberalism, diversity and pluralism in this moment of historical crisis whereby the state of today seems to have strong links to the state of the past.