Art Project to Launch During UN General Assembly
Olafur Eliasson, Simone Fattal, and Yinka Shonibare are among the 21 artists invited to share their vision of a sustainable future.
Olafur Eliasson, You are solar powered (2024). Exhibition view: Future Ours, New York City (2024). Courtesy ART 2030 and JCDecaux. © 2024 Olafur Eliasson.
A public art project will open at the United Nations headquarters in New York this September during the 79th General Assembly, an annual forum for diplomats to discuss critical issues from peace to security.
The project, FUTURE OURS, is organised by ART 2030, a non-profit that facilitates art projects related to the UN's goals for development, including literacy, climate action, and affordable clean energy.
The organisation partnered with curators Patricia Domínguez, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Jeppe Ugelvig, and advertising firm JCDecaux who own billboards in some 80 countries.
'The project is an invitation to rethink how art can help discussions about how it can aid us in rethinking what is or what could be "ours" in futures worth fighting for,' the curators explained.
Twenty-one artists and collectives, including Olafur Eliasson, Simone Fattal, and Yinka Shonibare, were invited to respond to the UN Summit of the Future's call to address present and future challenges.
Artists will speak to climate disaster, resource conflict, war, economic inequity, and the erosion of human rights. Their posters will be exhibited on bus shelters across New York later in September.
'While our future is marked by pressing environmental and societal emergencies, we stand at an opportune moment for transformative change,' said Luise Faurschou, ART 2030's founder and CEO.
FUTURE OURS will travel to Denmark in 2025 to be exhibited at Kunsthal Charlottenborg Biennale in Copenhagen. There, public artworks will seek to answer the question: what would artists advertise today? —[O]
