Curatorial themes
A question for every edition
Every Art Initiatives exhibition explores a question of our time through the works and personal stories of its artists. Each theme grows out of the one before it.
2025
Between Memory and Identity: Introspections
Our 2025 exhibition carried a special significance: it marked the transition of Art Initiatives into a formal association. What began as a project to raise funds and awareness had grown into a community, built on intercultural dialogue, on looking at one another with curiosity rather than judgment, and on supporting one another with empathy.
Questions of memory and identity have become urgent, especially for younger generations. The pressure to define and display the self has never been louder, yet the more rigid a definition of identity becomes, the more it risks deepening divisions instead of opening dialogue. Susan Sontag saw memory not as a fixed archive but as a partial, refracted construction, and identity, like art, as something to be understood in relation to others. The exhibition explored four poles, individual and collective identity, and individual and collective memory, and how they influence one another.
The works staged memory and identity not as fixed truths but as processes. Luis West’s Ibiza Sunrise Pill turned a shared Balearic dawn into a private vessel of memory. Eglė Otto’s Jeanne d’Arc fractured a historical icon into lace, armour and flame. Louis Wessendorff’s Where did it turn? staged identity’s quiet collapse, while Sarice Brudet and Conxi Sane turned fragility and trauma into renewal. Raphaële Bidault-Waddington and Amélie von Heydebreck explored the unseen and the radiant, Jean Willi and Stephan Crasneanscki gave resonance to history and absence, and Phrank’s Cocoon Clubbers captured memory at its most collective.
Together they spoke to one idea that also guides Art Initiatives: memory and identity are not fixed possessions, but processes of encounter, loss, transformation and openness. The 2025 auction supported Anno’s One Fine Day and Asperger Ibiza y Formentera.
2026
Negotiating Belonging
Art Initiatives 2026 explores how identity is shaped through the systems, environments and cultural structures that surround us. Rather than approaching identity as a purely internal or reflective process, this year’s curatorial framework focuses on the external forces that influence how individuals and communities locate themselves within the world.
Across painting, sculpture, installation and photography, the selected artists examine how belonging is constructed, negotiated and sometimes disrupted within contemporary global realities. Their practices engage with landscapes, archives, migration, urban cultures and material histories as spaces where identity takes form.
The exhibition proposes that belonging is not fixed but continuously renegotiated through movement, encounter and exchange. Each artist offers a different perspective on how personal narratives intersect with broader cultural, political and environmental structures. Together, these works form a dialogue about how individuals navigate the complex geographies of contemporary life. In a world marked by migration, global networks and shifting cultural boundaries, identity emerges not as a stable essence but as a dynamic process shaped through interaction with place, history and community.
How the themes connect
In 2025 we looked inward, at how individual and collective memory shape who we are. In 2026 we turn outward, to the places, systems, histories and communities that shape where and how we belong. Together the two editions form one conversation, from the inner life of identity to the outer forces that shape it.