The great questions afflicting contemporary society are the central thread of the exhibition and hold together a wide variety of different works and media - the exhibits range from animation and interactive installations to sound, from sculpture to mass media, and from text and painting to collage and even smells. The aim is to communicate as directly as possible to the public how the world we live in has changed. The artists' age is something else they have in common: they are mostly young, born in the 1960s and 70s. As well as their dates of birth, they are also united by the fact that they are not afraid of communicating with and involving their audience. As Kold says, "Since the themes and problems are familiar and shared by everyone, the contribution that art can make is to give these questions a different perspective and offer new ways of explaining and interpreting what is happening."
Some of the works on show point the finger at the most negative aspects of consumerism. A video made by Superflex, the Danish collective, shows a McDonalds restaurant - used here as a symbol - being slowly but inexorably submerged in water. Another example is an extremely ordered supermarket, which is singled out for obsessive-compulsive demolition, created by the artist Aernout Milk, from the Netherlands. If you have ever wondered what fear smells like, the work of the artist and chemist Sissel Tolaas will provide an answer: for years he has identified, collected and interpreted in the laboratory the smells surrounding us.
There are references, of course, to the climate change disrupting the planet. The exhibition includes the racing car covered in ice which was made by Olafur Eliasson for BMW. Also included is the cloud of chanting, droning microphones created by the Mumbai-based Indian artist Shilpa Gupta, who has worked for several years on the relationships between technology, globalisation, social control, memory, and the dynamics of gender and race.
The sculptures of the American Elloitt Hundley are complex organisms that seem to grow organically: they are narrative structures inspired by personal stories, as well as by ancient myths, nature and culture. In contrast, Sebastian Diaz Morales, the Argentine artist uses simple, low-budget videos as a tool for observing reality: they mix fact and fantasy, touching on the natural environment as well as the pressures of modern society and its political and economic balancing acts.
On 7 January, to conclude the exhibition, Pipilotti Rist will bring her work Homo sapiens sapiens to Copenhagen; this is a large video installation which was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2005.
Alongside so many critical and disturbing visions, however, there are also artists like the Mexican Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. He offers a more optimistic, participatory take on reality: for him, art should provide an opportunity for a good party. As he says, "It need not be a happy party but I see the artwork as an environment that takes on a life of its own with the participation of the public... only when people interact with the pieces do I begin to understand what the project is." Again art is imitating life - because, to paraphrase the exhibition's title, the world essentially is everyone's and its future depends on the actions and reactions of those who live in it. Elena Sommariva
