“GREY IS THE NEW PINK - Moments of Age(ing)”

Who is old – where and when? Can we meet the ‘challenge of ageing’ optimistically? And what potential lies slumbering in the process of aging?

On every first Wednesday in a month, at 11am, there will be an exhibition tour  for older citizens, who require longer breaks during the tour. At certain stations in the exhibition GREY IS THE NEW PINK there will be possibilities to take a break or sit down for a while. The guides will adapt to the pace of the visitors.

Projections for global demographic trends are forecasting an increase in the world’s older population. The process of growing older is not just important for each individual, but has implications for the social and cultural spheres. Yet each generation ages differently. And when can we actually talk of someone as ‘old’ at all? Even if the visible biological aging processes are the same the world over, each culture has its differences in defining ‘age’. There is no universally valid definition of when ‘old age’ starts. So who is old – where and when?

GREY IS THE NEW PINK presents diverse ideas and models of ‘age(ing)’ from the perspective of cultural studies and the visual arts, as well as personal and individual experience. Like fragments in a lifetime’s memories, the exhibition combines into an anthology of aging the individual ways of dealing with such topics as lifestyle, love and sexuality, transmission of knowledge, longevity, illness, health, and death.

In the exhibition ‘age(ing)’ is explored internationally in photographs, videos, literature, drawings, as well as large-scale and multimedia installations and performances both in the work of scientists, artists and poets, as well as younger and older people from the general population. Numerous exhibits from the from the Weltkulturen Museum’s Africa, Americas, South East Asia, Oceania, Visual Anthropology collections  and the library broaden the view of the subject.