2025 SUMMIT
QUARTER LIFE CRISIS
ART IN A WORLD ON THE BRINK
The Verbier Art Summit is proud to announce its 2025 theme and partnership with Philip Tinari, director of the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in China. The much-anticipated relaunch of the Summit also has a new date and will take place on 4 & 5 April 2025, addressing an urgent theme:
QUARTER LIFE CRISIS
Art in a World on the Brink
“Taking its title from the pop-psychology name for the anxiety of young adulthood coined in the early 2000s, this edition of the Verbier Art Summit will bring together artists and thinkers from across geographies and generations to ask questions about the geopolitical, digital, human and institutional dimensions of the art world in the twenty-first century to which there are no easy answers”, states Philip Tinari.
Photo by Stefen Chow.
PHILIP TINARI
In his curatorial statement, Tinari writes that the 2025
Summit edition looks to situate the precarious state of the art world a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century, at the intersection of several related vectors: the long slide from a unipolar to a multipolar world, the ongoing digital acceleration, and the articulation and intersection of
complex multiple identities and subjectivities:
“After an extended pandemic hiatus, and in light of myriad reckonings, upheavals, and conflicts, the Verbier Art Summit returns to ask, “How might we understand our collective quarter life crisis? And who might counsel us through this global moment of anxiety?”
ABOUT THE SUMMIT
Anneliek Sijbrandij, Founder of the Verbier Art Summit, is pleased to once again welcome artists, curators, writers, academics, collectors and innovators to Verbier, Switzerland. Over a long weekend of dialogue, new visions and initiatives will be developed around the Quarter Life Crisis in which we find ourselves. The Summit Talks programme can be attended on-site in Verbier, and online via live-broadcasting on the virtual platform. The programme will also include several art experiences, providing both a local as well as an international insight into the art world. Additionally, the invited Summit speakers and members also participate in an extended Debating programme to generate innovative ideas that will drive social change.
As the Summit aims to inspire people globally, the conversation will continue through the Summit publication series designed by Irma Boom and made available in art museum shops via Koenig Books.
More details on the 2025 Summit, including a new group of speakers, will be announced over the coming months and registrations will open in 2025.
ABOUT PHILIP TINARI
Philip Tinari is Director and Chief Executive of UCCA Center for Contemporary. Since 2011, he has led its transformation from a founder-driven private museum into China’s leading independent contemporary art institution, presenting a wide range of exhibitions and programs to more than one million annual visitors across four venues in Beijing, Shanghai, Beidaihe and Yixing. His award-winning program has included more than 120 exhibitions of artists ranging from Cao Fei and Xu Bing to Rauschenberg and Picasso, putting the contemporary art of China into global context and vice versa.
Tinari is a widely recognised writer and curator. He was co-curator of the 2017 exhibition Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Guggenheim Bilbao, and SFMOMA, and curator of the 2016 exhibition Bentu: Chinese Artists in a Time of Turbulence and Transformation at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. In 2021 he served as artistic director of Feeling the Stones, the inaugural edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale in Riyadh and then the largest contemporary art exhibition to date in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In 2009, he founded the magazine LEAP under the auspices of the Modern Media Group. He has been named a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum and a fellow of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. Born near Philadelphia and based in Beijing, Tinari speaks near-native Mandarin. He was a Fulbright scholar at Tsinghua University, and holds degrees from Duke and Harvard.
