The title of this year’s bachelor’s and master’s graduation exhibition of the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW at the Kunsthaus Baselland is ANOTHER BIRTH. It is a paraphrase of Tavallodi Digar (Another Birth), the best-known book by the Iranian poet and filmmaker Forough Farrokhzad (1935 – 1967). The book—containing 35 poems, originally published in Farsi in 1964 and first translated into English in 1981—offers an exercise in thinking about how renewal and transformation, emotional and intellectual freedom become possible, and how solitude can give birth to collective self-discovery. Meanwhile, the exhibition’s subtitle refers to a collection of verses by the same author, Iman biyavarim be Aghaz-e Fasl-e Sard (Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season) published posthumously in 1974. We—Annette Amberg and Chus Martínez—as the curatorial team of the 2026 graduation exhibition found in Forough Farrokhzad’s words a perfect frame through which to address the effort of art and artists to produce a sense of possibility and an idea of human agency within society. These are qualities that describe well the works gathered in this exhibition.

A graduation exhibition has no subject. Its subject is the proximity created by studying together, the generational climate that emerges from sharing a period of life and learning. Living lives that barely leave us time to think and reflect, we often forget how precious these formative years are, how precious education is, and how important both are for our future understanding of the world and our future engagement with it. The works in this exhibition are preoccupied with taming the difficult conditions inherited by artists and turning them into possibilities. Technology appears recurrently, but so does an attention to small aspects of reality that are often lost in the pursuit of productivity and in a society too concerned with maintaining its economic traction. It is true that we are deeply dependent on the economy. Yet the economy should serve our ultimate needs, not greed. Greed surrounds us. Greed as a force willing to sacrifice lives, the Earth, values, dialogue, and democracy itself. The young artists in this exhibition never speak about our multiple crises as “problems.” Instead, they invite us to focus on something else, something that may seem very far away from what is going on. Taking us very far away is a gift. It is something only artists can do. Artists have existed for centuries to rescue us from our tendency to instrumentalize everything, even life itself.

As you move through the exhibition, you will soon forget the idea that we should have a “goal.” This language of the corporate world has polluted everything and made every step seem to be taken for some ultimate reason. Here, in this exhibition, the goal is replaced by purpose. Art points to the fact that a life without a goal can still be a life with a purpose. That purpose could be to collectively produce another birth: another birth of social purpose, of freedom, and of relevance; another birth of a society capable of making sense of itself, a society that stays together and cultivates its collective mind through ideas rather than anger or hate; a society that cultivates education and art rather than war.

This is not a metaphor. It is a political program. Yet it is a program that we are increasingly replacing with a transactional society, one that operates according to an earmarked logic and is based on trade-offs, and in which we become little more than units of labor, roles that are now increasingly subject to automation and the growing reach of AI. Art is perhaps the most powerful tool humankind has ever developed to escape greed and fatalism and to regenerate the social with meaning, relevance, and a sense of purpose that can reawaken hope.

We extend our gratitude to the Kunsthaus Baselland, its director Ines Goldbach, and her team, for the collaboration and for hosting our graduation exhibition for the eleventh time. We would also like to thank the team of the Institute Art Gender Nature—lecturers, mentors, technical, scientific, administrative, and production staff—for their guidance and engagement. Last but not least, we thank all artists for their brilliant works, their trust in us and themselves, and the continuous exchange.

Chus Martínez and Annette Amberg