‚It’s the End of the World As We Know It‘ – The song title of the U.S. college rock band R.E.M. captures the spirit of the times like no other, although the song was already released 35 years ago. Apocalyptic ideas accompany the history of mankind; they can already be found in ancient oriental cultures, but they are especially firmly anchored in the Western worldview. Thus „the tradition of apocalyptic thinking belongs deeply to the Christian culture“ (Johannes Fried). It is therefore not surprising that then, as now, dystopian ideas are always associated with changes and the transformation of the known environment and evoke existential fears.

This can also be observed today, at the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century. We live in a time in which the world is changing ever more rapidly. For a long time now, we have no longer been talking about change, but about transformation, by which we mean fundamental and permanent changes – triggered by crises at all levels of human coexistence and living space. The world as we knew it, does it still exist? A social uncertainty is at least perceptible everywhere.

This can also be felt in art, but at the same time art offers a wide variety of starting points to help us locate ourselves anew in these very turbulent times. In the international group exhibition „Is it the end of the world as we know it?“ we show eleven artistic positions, which deal in their work with the individual and social challenges of our present. Drawing, painting and photographically, they open up to us serious and critical, but also affectionate and humorous views of the rapidly changing world. By looking into the human psyche, into nature, into the past or the present, the exhibition not only wants to show the viewers the complexity of the topic, but also to enable them to approach it individually.