Hannah Arendt @ Richard Saltoun Gallery

The first in a 12-month programme dedicated to the writings of the German-born, American political philosopher Hannah Arendt, ‘The Modern Age’ extends Arendt’s examination of tradition and the modern age into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries or what she understood as “the modern world.” We are living through a very difficult period of history marked by a tremendous amount of instability. Driven largely by the COVID-19 pandemic, we have had to radically alter how we educate, socialise, consume and care for one another. This has intensified our dependence on technology and brought with it something that Arendt articulated as “new problems and perplexities which our tradition of thought was unable to cope with.” The artworks selected offer pause for thought, and in doing so, help us emotionally and intellectually navigate the challenging time in which we find ourselves.