Rehearsing Tomorrow: Art Institutions as Spaces of Possibility

Lecture on 18 December 2026

Societies live not only by knowledge, memory and institutions, but also by their capacity to relate to an open future – to keep open, between origin and expectation, a space in which they can imagine themselves otherwise.

Museums, art galleries and biennials make this engagement with time visible. They preserve cultural memory, yet they also exhibit the present, shape perception and allow the familiar to lose its self-evidence. In this way, a society encounters not only what it once was, but also the question of what it might become.

This question takes on particular urgency in a present defined by acceleration and constant transformation, in which the future paradoxically appears as something already determined: as crisis, risk and the imperative to adapt. Where the future is treated merely as something to be managed, the capacity to imagine it otherwise begins to diminish.

This gives renewed relevance to the age-old question: What can art do? It does not resolve conflicts or provide programmes. Its power lies in shifting the structures of perception, making the familiar seem strange and allowing us to experience the contingency of what exists – reality has come to be as it is, and it can become otherwise.

Herein lies its democratic significance: democracy needs places that remind us that its order is neither natural nor complete. To rehearse tomorrow does not mean anticipating the future, but making tangible the fact that it has not yet been decided. In this sense, art institutions are to be understood as spaces of possibility – as precious as they are under threat.