How We Live Now

2020 has seen huge changes in our society. The global Covid-19 pandemic has affected the way society functions more significantly than any other event outside of wartime, changing the way we live, work, connect and interact with each other in radical ways.

Governmental responses to the pandemic, and the intense public awareness of current affairs that has emerged within this crisis, have exposed deep divisions and injustices in society, bringing issues of social inequality, poverty, systemic racism, political fundamentalism, and the exploitation of the natural world into sharper focus than ever.

As an arts organisation dedicated to creating new art for new audiences within the physical and social structures of communities, Foreground’s programme has always been inspired by people and place. How We Live Now is an extension of this fundamental passion, expressed in a new programme of online projects that provides new commissioning opportunities for artists to respond to and explore how community is formed and expressed within our increasingly divided society.

November 2020 saw How We Live Now launch with a newly commissioned photography project from acclaimed American-born, Somerset-based, photographer Aaron Schuman. Launched on the eve of the American presidential election, SLANT (Election, Fall 2020) is a new edit of Schuman’s celebrated series that uses police reports and photographs from Amherst, Massachusetts, to reflect on the disquieting rise of division and intolerance within the climate of post-truth politics in contemporary America.

This was followed in January 2021 by the premiere of a new body of work by award-winning emerging London-based, Irish-Nigerian photographer Cian Oba Smith. Released in the week that the UK recorded the biggest daily death tolls since the pandemic began, A Quiet Prayer is Oba Smith’s meditation on London in the first lockdown of Spring 2020, and is a beautiful but sombre meditation on London in the first lockdown of Spring 2020, and a sensitive portrait of how the pandemic has disproportionally affected the most vulnerable elements of British society.

How We Live Now is an expansion of Foreground’s commitment to commissioning artists to work in public space in all its forms and to continuing to reach audiences in new ways in these strange and restricted times.

How We Live Now has been made possible with funding from Arts Council England’s Emergency Response Fund.

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