Martina Huber on a Research Trip to India

Exhibition view, Back to the Roots, AIA Space, 2022. Photo credit: Léa Jullien

Martina Huber is the founder and curator of the platform WE ARE AIA I Awareness in Art, which she founded in 2020 at the Löwenbräu in Zurich, Switzerland. Martina initiates and curates transdisciplinary collaborations between artists and experts from the field to sharpen awareness of complex social questions and make issues accessible on an emotional level. The young female curator and her team are the 2023 winner of the international art and ecology price of Climanow for the community public art project “Co-Habitations” Climate Action: The City in 100 Years. Some of her past projects include “The Mouth is for Speaking,” which considered what is needed to stand up for one’s rights, “Back to the Roots,” about the objectification and exploitation of nature, and “Can You See Me Now?” about digital surveillance in the form of automated data collection. Central to her projects is their approachable nature, as well as a pedagogical ideology, so as to promote constructive discourse and reveal innovative possibilities for change.

Martina believes that art can stimulate change: “Worldwide problems such as global warming has transformed ecology in the last ten years from a niche interest into a topic relevant to all parts of society. Now ecology has developed into a wide-ranging field of study with interesting subcategories. In the last decade, the human impact on earth’s biosphere has become an urgent topic, one being dealt with on multiple levels. Yet we often separate artistic and scientific approaches, since there is no space for an exchange of ideas. We want to change that.”

Since 2022, Martina has been working closely with artists from India, Ishita Chakraborty and Ravi Agarwal, who participated respectively in We Are AIA exhibitions: The Mouth Is for Speaking and Back to the Roots. Through her research trip, Martina aims to strengthen the relationship between Switzerland and India, to meet existing contacts as well as meeting new artists, curators and local cultural producers for a future projection with regards to Southeast Asia and Europe.

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