Maurizio Cattelan, Pierpaolo Ferrari, Toiletpaper Magazine 15, 2017
Maurizio Cattelan is a prominent contemporary artist, with a keen political eye and a grim sense of humour. He famously showed the Pope being struck down by a comet, a boyish kneeling Hitler, horses stuck in a wall. In 2010, he teamed up with the photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari to found “Toiletpaper“, a bi-annual magazine with only images, no words, a ravishing visual mix of surreal pop beauty and an exploration of the contradictions of the consumerist world we live in. His exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2011 was a triumph, his work probing the unconscious, “tapping into sublimated perversions and spasms of violence”, as the curator Nancy Spector pointed out. In this time of the hyperreal and the surreal, the blatant and the blurred, Cattelan and Ferrari turn up the volume even more to showcase the unfolding drama of our times.
Applications welcome for the program “The Future of Democracy”
THE NEW INSTITUTE is opening its second call for fellowships for the program “The Future of Democracy”, bringing together academics, artists, journalists from fall 2021 on to addresses the current challenges and failures of the democratic system and aiming to find ways to strengthen participation. The goal is to imagine how democracy can be reconfigured to be fit for purpose and capable of evolving in the future.
Some key questions of this program are: How can we strengthen democratic deliberation? How can we enhance decision-making at the intersection of politics and knowledge? How can we reconfigure social and political communication in the digital age? How can we reinvent political representation? Particularly relevant aspects in this regard will be the strengthening of deliberative democracy, the reconfiguring of the use of social media and online communication, enhancing decision-making and the future of political representation.
We will bring together globally leading scholars and practitioners in an effort to make democracy more adaptable and adequate to face the challenges of the 21st century. The work will be interdisciplinary and trans-sectoral and very much solution-oriented, in the spirit of the aim and ambition of THE NEW INSTITUTE.
For more information and application details, see “The Future of Democracy” Program