By coming together, Frontlines of Engagement 2027 invites participants to trace the ethical, aesthetic, and practical dimensions of art initiatives within and across fragile contexts and armed conflicts. Organised by artasfoundation in cooperation with artlink and Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), this practice-based assembly brings together around 130 artists, researchers, peacebuilders, mediators, and development practitioners. It gathers people whose paths may not often cross, yet who share deep concern and engagement for contexts shaped by conflict. Acknowledging that the most urgent insights often emerge from lived encounters, relational processes, and collective reflections, the conference aims to build an experience-based, practice-driven body of knowledge about transdisciplinary approaches; explore methods of dealing with rooted and emerging challenges; and collectively understand global developments and the transformative role of art in a world shaped by conflict.
Thematic focus
The conference is shaped around three learning spaces.
Beyond good intentions: what do cooperation and participation really mean?
How can they be anchored beyond the limitation of singular art projects? What are the ethical, aesthetic, and political questions that must remain central to cooperation in the arts, and how can the focus remain not just on what art achieves, but how it reshapes relationships, perceptions, and ways of being together?
Art as mediator in peace processes
How might artistic practice influence what mediation can address, how it moves, and what it can hold? And how might it travel across different levels between formal negotiation and the community work of repair, reconciliation and memory?
How can practical knowledge be more present in formal discourses?
Artistic practice generates knowledge that is embodied, affective, and often difficult to communicate through the frameworks of theory, policy, or institutional discourse. How can we make space for these forms of knowledge to be acknowledged and valued across sectors such as academia, humanitarian work, and international cooperation?
Previous conferences:
Art at Risk Conference 2020
Art in Conflict Conference 2015
Photos on this Website
The Swiss artist Cécile Hummel has been involved in several artasfoundation projects in the past, and we have invited her to select a series of her work for this website. The photographs she chose are part of the ongoing project “00_beginnings”, in which she takes the first image that is captured on the negative films she uses (number 0 before it begins with image 1). This first image is usually incomplete – not an intentional photo, but a beginning. It shows what the camera sees, before it is directed by the human eye.
