We Lost Control Again surveys the questions raised by the work of artist Rikke Luther between 2015 and 2025, exploring the long-range effects of this era of collapse, and the effect on social orders and the stability of the Earth system.
We Lost Control Again recounts the twentieth-century attempt to construct an international political and aesthetic order in the wake of war, and what remains of that Babelian architecture today.
The twentieth century bequeathed a cross-national political and legal architecture, cemented in place by the United Nations. Ideological differences were overlaid with an assumption of progress and a universalising aesthetic of 'concrete Modernity'. However, as communism collapsed, and a digital communication and control systems took root, neo-liberal hostility to the Enlightenment values underpinning Western democracy and the rules-based international order swelled. As the aesthetic and political architectures of Modernity have retreated, the means through which planetary heating and species extinctions might be addressed have faded rapidly.
Rikke Luther (born 1970) is Danish artist and researcher based in Copenhagen.
