UMEA.- The Map: Navigating the Present is a genuinely trans-disciplinary and intercultural event engaging human culture’s possibly most fascinating, sophisticated and diverse means of knowing and navigating the world, i.e. the map. The Map takes a very broad approach to maps and cartographic practices of today; allowing for artistic, cultural, political and scientific practices to combine and meet and collide in this exhibition.

The trans- and interdisciplinary nature of this event is best described by noting that in The Map contemporary art and contemporary visual culture will be engaged simultaneously with and parallel to practices in cartography, cultural geography, cultural studies, political science, philosophy, sociology and linguistics.

Altogether over 40 projects, selected from a global platform, are participating, addressing a wide variety of topics, themes, problematic; all with a cartographic focus or mapping practices as the common denominator. Ranging from meditations on cartography and the history of world maps, to complex mappings of contemporary political, social and economic phenomena, to maps and journeys expressed or utilized in a variety of artistic explorations, The Map finds its theme expressed in a great variety of media. In The Map, the public will encounter both maps and the work of making maps as sophisticated tools for knowing and understanding the world, of accessing reality, but also maps as producers/generators of new or alternative realities.