Inauguration Human Rights Pavilion

In the next 18 months, the Pavilion travels around the globe, through exhibitions, correspondence, Cosmocafes and SoTO dialogues, gradually bringing together a collective memory and a new vision on Art and Human Rights, a snapshot of our time. By the end of 2020, curator and artist Koen Vanmechelen will consolidate these inputs into a unifying OPUS. He will present this OPUS to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the European Commission and to the President and Curator of the 59th Venice Biennale of Art with a call to establish a recurrent supra-national Pavilion of Human Rights as part of the Venice Biennale of Art. 

Referring to the American author Ursula K. Le Guin’s 2014 speech: "We need the voices of Artists, Writers, Thinkers, Dreamers who can see alternatives to how we live now, who can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need people who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries, artists – realists of a larger reality." 

Read Koen Vanmechelen’s full curatorial statement

Visit the Human Rights Pavilion website