We Grown-Ups Can Also Be Afraid

at Attenborough Arts Centre

This summer, discover We Grown-Ups Can Also Be Afraid, an exhibition presented by Attenborough Arts Centre and drawn exclusively from the David and Indrė Roberts Collection. Featuring a diverse selection of contemporary works, the exhibition invites reflection on the complexities of the world we inhabit today.

The times we are living through seem to be characterised by precarity and instability on multiple fronts: climate crisis, global conflict, genocide, mass migration, and the violence of Western imperialism. We Grown-Ups Can Also Be Afraid explores how some of the most significant artists of our time are responding to the anxieties of our contemporary moment through their work.

Drawn from the David and Indrė Roberts Collection, the exhibition encompasses sculpture, works on canvas, moving image and installation. The artists represented in the exhibition respond to these themes in very different ways, but their practices are connected by a sustained engagement with globally important issues that can often feel too big and too difficult for us to think about.

This is not an exhibition about art and activism. The artists represented may not consider their work as a form of political activism — indeed, there is no sense that we are being lectured to or told what to think. Rather, it seems that we are being invited to direct our attention to something urgently important, to look more closely at the world as it is now.

Art can help us to share stories, to reflect on individual and collective experiences of conflict, to process the unimaginable and empathise with the plight of others. The works brought together in this exhibition may not provide an easy solution to the things that keep us awake at night, but collectively they ask: What does it mean to make art now? Do artists have a responsibility to respond to our contemporary moment? And what responsibilities do we have to sit up and pay attention?