We are pleased to invite you to the virtual closing event of the Austrian-American cultural project No-Place Like the Future – Artists Evoke a World After Corona:

No-Place Like the Future – Virtual Vernissage
Thursday, June 18, 2020
10:00 am PT / 1:00 pm ET / 19:00 CEST

Registration: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_sJdbw9frRFK5IH3x3rMPeg

Over the past eight weeks, more than 30 artists of various fields, based in Austria and the United States, teamed up to create artworks addressing a world after the coronavirus pandemic. Join us for a virtual vernissage featuring interviews with the artists and an experimental interactive gallery tour (MAKE.SPACE, created by digital artists Jens Vetter and Aza Raskin), where the outcomes of our transatlantic collaborations will be revealed and questions can be asked by the audience. 

Among the works is the animated video “Sequence of Tenses” by visual artist Adele Razkövi and novelist and co-founder of an app for writers Vikram Chandra, which features a message from the past, and a direction for the future. We also see pianist Kenny Werner philosophize about the state of mind in a utopian situation, where compassion, the love for one another, love for oneself and the end of all self-criticism are key, captured by filmmaker Erwin Wagenhofer in a short film. Artist, writer and curator Walter Seidl and visual artist Francis Ruyter present a series of photos of deserted, empty public places, telling the visual story of stay-at-home orders, the void created by this health crisis and drawing attention to the precarious situation of “essential” seasonal agricultural workers. Cartoonist and art teacher Doris Schamp together with artist Phil Savenick assemble a group of young creatives to help us visualize a better tomorrow. Their video “Visions of The Future” ends on the high note that “science will get us out of this pandemic, but it is art, that will get us through it”.

"This project proved once again that artists are our visionary guides to the future – in particular in times of crisis. The artworks that have been created are stories of resilience, positivity and community building and give us hope for the times ahead", said Martin Weiss, Ambassador of Austria to the United States and one of the co-organizers of the project.

No-Place Like the Future – Artists Evoke a World After Corona is a cultural project created by the Austrian diplomatic missions in the United States (Embassy of Austria Washington, DC, Austrian Cultural Fora in Washington, DC, and New York, Austrian Consulate-General Los Angeles, as well as Open Austria, Austria’s innovation office in San Francisco) in order to preserve transatlantic cultural exchange and dialogue in times of a global pandemic. The project is funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs.

Learn more about the project, all the participating artists, and the creative process for the joint artworks at www.noplacelikethefuture.org/.