What Goes Around (part of SF Int'l Arts Festival)

Artists examine the threads of common experience across cultures and time

As the title suggests, there is a cyclical rhythm to our existence, a nod to the notion that history repeats. One path to understanding the development of a global society, then, is through past experiences of time, place and cultural standpoints that meet in the present.

In keeping with the San Francisco International Arts Festival’s annual theme: ‘The Truth in Knowing/Now,’ we evaluate the complexity of our impact – as individuals, as collectivities, as artists - on the development of an emerging global world. This involves a continuous re-evaluation of how personal value systems and identity are influenced by technology, mass media, social conventions and political policies. These variegated referents influence our individual framework of pre-suppositions (so called ‘life lessons’) that define individual ‘truths’. Based on individual choices informed by personal ‘truths’ or ‘knowing,’ our ability (or willingness) to adapt to or affect the forces directing cultural change on a global scale is also how we locate the ‘threads’ that connect us.

The intent of the ‘What Goes Around’ exhibit is to instigate dialogue amongst artists and between artists and viewers that, ultimately, presents diverse ideas about what is involved in the development of a global society and culture. Based on the precept that we can predict the future by looking through the lens of the present to examine lessons learned, 'Time' is the overarching conceptual thread used to anchor the far-ranging responses elicited by this exhibit.