Potential World 1 @ Migros Museum, Zurich - Planetery Memories

Potential Worlds 1: Planetary Memories
Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich
Through October 11, 2020

Monira Al Qadiri, Maria Thereza Alves, Alberto Baraya, Ursula Biemann, Carolina Caycedo, Cooking Sections, Mark Dion, Mishka Henner, Reena Saini Kallat, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Almagul Menlibayeva, Katja Novitskova, Tabita Rezaire, Zina Saro-Wiwa, Himali Singh Soin

URSULA BIEMANN

Subatlantic, 2015 

Videostill

Sammlung Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst

Potential Worlds 1: Planetary Memories is the first in a series of two exhibitions that explore the relationship between humans and nature. The works on view in both exhibitions scrutinize the human impact on the planet and sketch potential future scenarios for life on Earth. Climate change and other phenomena are evidence that human activities are affecting the planet; the repercussions are visible and tangible. Faced with this urgent concern, we need to question our own actions and ways of thinking. That is the point of departure for the art on display in the exhibition Potential Worlds 1: Planetary Memories. The works shed light on forms of the appropriation of the natural world in the pursuit of power and resources. They point up the consequences for the environment as well as the social fabric and question conceptions in the natural sciences that were developed in the course of the power-driven appropriation of nature. Incorporating critical analysis, wide-ranging research, and creative solutions, they also underscore the potentials for coexistence on our planet and show that it is possible to devise and enact a new form of communal life on Earth.

The dynamics of the appropriation as well as destruction of the natural environment are one recurrent theme of the exhibition. The works undertake an acute critique of these dynamics and point up potential avenues of resistance. One major concern is the industrial processing and exploitation of natural resources, as in oil production. In this connection, URSULA BIEMANN (b. 1955) examines the global ramifications of climate change. Her video Deep Weather (2013) combines footage shot in tar sand landscapes in Canada from which petroleum is mined with material showing Bangladeshis building a levee to protect their land from flooding. Reflecting on some of the causes and effects of climate change, the artist’s work draws attention to interconnections between the planet’s ecosystems and raises awareness of the political responsibilities. MONIRA AL QADIRI (b. 1983) studies the impact of the oil industry on the culture of the countries along the Persian Gulf. Her sculptural abstractions of oil drilling heads visualize the displacement of the region’s pearl fishers by oil production.

MONIRA AL QADIRI

OR–BIT 1, 2016; Spectrum 1, 2016

Courtesy the artist

Photo: Lorenzo Pusterla

MONIRA AL QADIRI

Divine Memory, 2019

Videostill

Courtesy the artist

The artists ZINA SARO-WIWA (b. 1976) and CAROLINA CAYCEDO (b. 1978) explore forms of resistance and reactions to the destruction and privatization of the natural environment. In her video installation Karikpo Pipeline (2015), Zina Saro-Wiwa turns the spotlight on the extraction of oil from the ground beneath the Niger Delta. Oil production began in the 1950s, with dramatic consequences for the environment and the area’s people, the Ogoni, who were given no say on the regulations governing the oil industry’s drilling operations. The oil pipelines crisscrossing the Ogoni’s land serve as the setting of the video installation. Dancers and acrobats perform on the pipes. Their movements and masks are derived from the Karikpo dance, a traditional form in Ogoni culture. Karikpo Pipeline examines how people live with the debris left behind by ecological destruction and calls for forms of interaction with the environment rooted in cultural traditions. Carolina Caycedo’s project Be Dammed (2012–) highlights the devastating effects of hydroelectric dams on rivers and the way the privatization of water has ravaged communities and ecosystems. The artist’s focus is on the environment along rivers in Latin and North America and the political and performative activism of advocates for an environmentally and socially conscious use of hydroelectric power.

Like the resources that humans exploit for energy generation, the ecological impact of agriculture is a major area of concern in the exhibition. MISHKA HENNER's (b. 1976) prints visualize the impact of industrialized architecture and resource extraction. They are based on satellite photographs the artist found online and show large feedlots as well as oil fields. Yet they also bring abstract paintings to mind: Mishika Henner’s works illustrate how abstract and inconceivable the dimensions of agriculture and the industrial use of land have become. Agrarian culture also figures prominently in the work of the artist duo COOKING SECTIONS (2015–). Its point of departure is the French colonization of Algeria and the competition between the two countries’ winemakers. The artists scrutinize the labels under which cheeses and wines are sold and the classification of products as «natural» or «national». REENA SAINI KALLAT (b. 1973) addresses territorial conflicts: her art visualizes a landscape in which nature serves as the symbolic model of a world that has overcome national borders and interstate conflicts over resources. Each work unites two animal or plant species that are considered national symbols in states separated by disputed boundaries.

MARK DION 

The Library for the Birds of Zürich, 2016/2020

Sammlung Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst

Photo: Lorenzo Pusterla

MARK DION

The Library for the Birds of Zürich, 2016/2020, Detail

Sammlung Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst

Photo: Lorenzo Pusterla

MARK DION

The Library for the Birds of Zürich, 2016/2020, Detail

Sammlung Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst

Photo: Lorenzo Pusterla

In light of the human appropriation of nature, the works in the exhibition inquire into ways to gather and disseminate knowledge of nature when humans believe themselves to be in a position of dominance. In his installation The Library for the Birds of Zürich (2016/20), MARK DION (b. 1961) has gathered assorted books on ornithology in a large cage. The library is indeed one for the birds, and so live zebra finches and canaries flit about. The books are complemented by bird-hunters’ implements. The artist shows that the history of the natural sciences is inextricably intertwined with the history of man’s dominion over animals. At the same time, his work reveals the idea of making a gift to birds of the knowledge that humans have accumulated about their origins to be an absurd and presumptuous endeavor: the birds inhabit the cage in accordance with the laws of their own existence. KILUANJI KIA HENDA’s (b. 1979) humorous video Havemos de Voltar/We shall return (2017) portrays the giant sable antelope, which is also the national symbol of Angola, and lends it a voice. The video shows the animal, whose species is critically endangered, coming to life in an Angolan archive. It yearns to break free, return to nature, and escape its «fate» as a foil for human projections and object in a historical exhibition. This desire is framed in analogy with a poem by Angola’s first president after the downfall of the Portuguese colonial order, in which he expresses his fervent wish for genuine independence. The artist ALBERTO BARAYA’s (b. 1968) project Herbario de Plantas Artificiales (Herbarium of Artificial Plants) (2001–) is concerned with the figure of the traveling explorer and botanist as well as botanical classifications. It takes inspiration from itinerant scientists of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, whose voyages of discovery in the name of science served to legitimize Western claims to territorial rule; colonial structures conversely subsidized their research. Alberto Baraya collects artificial rather than living plants, classifying his specimens in handwritten notes. With his artificial flowers, the artist offers an ironic take on the heroic figure of the adventurer, whose ostensible scientific objectivity he calls in question. HIMALI SINGH SOIN’s (b. 1987) video takes the viewer to the Arctic and Antarctic regions and their mythologies, ecology, and history for a reflection on the widespread fear in nineteenth-century England that an ice age was imminent. Suffused with a magical atmosphere, the work combines documentary and historic footage with an imaginary world in which a figure is seen wandering through barren icebound sceneries.

MARIA THEREZA ALVES

Seeds of Change: New York–A Botany of Colonization, 2017

Courtesy the artist and Galerie Michel Rein, Paris/Brussels

Photo: Lorenzo Pusterla

TABITA REZAIRE

Deep Down Tidal, 2017

Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg/London

Photo: Lorenzo Pusterla

The exhibition raises the question not only of how and in which contexts knowledge about nature was generated—but also of how much nature has to say about humans. The artist MARIA THEREZA ALVES (b. 1961) retraces the trajectories of plants that merchants and slave traders unwittingly transported to new habitats on their ships, propagating them across the planet as witnesses to human migration. Her installation presents a collection of geographical ephemera as well as plants that found their way from European ports to New York. Where Maria Thereza Alves’s work lets plants attest to human history, TABITA REZAIRE (b. 1989) conceives of the ocean as a repository of memories of human action. Her video Deep Down Tidal (2017) traces the submarine cables that were laid across the ocean floors to tie the entire world together in a single network—and, as it turns out, follow the routes of the erstwhile transatlantic slave trade. The artist shines a light on the history and geography of technological infrastructures that sprawl over the planet and become part of the environment.

JAKOB KUDSK STEENSEN

RE-ANIMATED, 2018/2019,

VR Installation, VR Screenshot

Courtesy the artist

ALMAGUL MENLIBAYEVA

Astana.Departure, 2016-2019

Videoinstallation/ video installation, Videostill,

Courtesy American-Eurasian Art Advisors LLC

One question that is pervasive in the exhibition is how humanity’s presence becomes imprinted on the Earth—and what the long-term consequences may be. The works also asks how past histories of the environment will be narrated and recalled in the future—and which forms of life might yet come into being. In his virtual-reality installation RE-ANIMATED (2018–19), the artist JAKOB KUDSK STEENSEN (b. 1987) brings the Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō, an extinct bird, back to life as a digital avatar, releasing it into the wild on a replica of the Hawaiian island of Kauai that visitors are invited to discover using VR goggles. The artist designs a virtual world in which we can digitally reconstruct and recollect lost and destroyed formations of nature, envisioning nothing less than the reanimation his title proclaims. Where Jakob Kudsk Steensen replicates nature and lends it new form, KATJA NOVITSKOVA fabricates creatures inspired by biotechnology and science whose nature remains to be determined. ALMAGUL MENLIBAYEVA (b. 1969), meanwhile, uses the urban planning of Kazakhstan’s capital Astana (recently renamed Nur Sultan), a rapidly growing city surrounded by steppes, as a springboard for an investigation of technological and architectural visions for the future. Her work transposes footage exploring the urban fabric of Nur Sultan into a new thematic context by combining it with images from the cosmodrome in the Kazakh town of Baikonur. The spaceport and the rockets that lift off from it result in space debris that damages the environment. Devising a distinctive futuristic visual idiom, the artist examines the pollution generated by aeronautics while also speculating that our planet may become unlivable, its land surfaces blighted with human structures.

KATJA NOVITSKOVA

Pattern of Activation (C. Elegans), 2020, featuring 

Approximation, 2012– ongoing, and 

Pattern of Activation (Embryogenesis), 2017 

Courtesy the artist and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin 

Photo: Lorenzo Pusterla

The works in the exhibition shed light on histories and a possible future of the web of relationships between humans and nature, prompting searching reflections by asking: How do we perceive nature with our senses, and which means do we have to describe it? How do we live up to our responsibility for the planet? How do we imagine we will coexist on it? The second exhibition in the series, titled Potential Worlds 2: Eco-Fictions, will build on these questions in a speculative exploration of novel forms of life and community and the constantly shifting roles that humans play in an age of cutting-edge post-human technologies.

The exhibition was curated by HEIKE MUNDER (director Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst) and SUAD GARAYEVA-MALEKI (director YARAT Contemporary Art Space). The show will be on view at YARAT Contemporary Art Space, Baku from November 13 until February 21, 2021.

An accompanying publication with essays by Benjamin H. Bratton, T. J. Demos, Suad Garayeva-Maleki & Heike Munder, Reza Negarestani and Jussi Parikka, as well as short texts by Milena Bürge, Anna Fech and Rabea Kaczor will be released in the summer of 2020.

MIGROS MUSEUM FÜR GEGENWARTSKUNST
Limmatstrasse 270, 8005 Zürich
migrosmuseum.ch

Mark Dion @ Whitechapel Gallery, London

Mark Dion
Whitechapel Gallery, London
14 February - 13 May 2018

The Whitechapel Gallery presents a major solo exhibition of American artist MARK DION, with large-scale installations made between the 1990s to the present, including a new commission created especially for London. Each installation draws attention to characters that observe, conserve or exploit the natural world.

Mark Dion (b. 1961) approaches art by shadowing scientific enquiry, engaging in fieldwork, expeditions and experiments. Performing the role of scientist, explorer, museum curator and archeologist, Dion examines how knowledge is gathered, interpreted, classified and presented. His research and collections come together as elaborate installations, which combine artefacts, material culture, photographs and documents. His work raises questions concerning the culture of nature and the environment – such as how nature can exist in urban space but also how it is managed and controlled.

Curated by Whitechapel Gallery Director, Iwona Blazwick, Mark Dion begins with a new commission by the artist, to be unveiled in February 2018. Alongside this is a series of Hunting Blinds (2008), inspired by structures used to disguise hunters in the wild. Each is characterised by the personality of an imagined inhabitant, from the glutton or the dandy rococo to the librarian. Viewers are invited to examine the belongings and attributes of their absent owners. The librarian’s hunting blind is well-equipped with shelves full of books, a small armchair and equipment hanging neatly on the walls; while the Dandy delights in the decorative potential of natural objects and curios. In an exploration of hunting as a traditional, but contentious, cultural practice, wall-mounted felt banners made in the style of medieval heraldic standards depicting animals, such as the fox, bear and stag, accompany the installation.

A naturalist’s study, decorated with wallpaper designed by the artist then leads the viewer indoors and into the 19th century.  The clues and symbols pictured in photographs, intricate drawings, prints and models may look historic, but they touch on environmental issues of our time.

The exhibition continues with the Bureau for the Centre of the Study for Surrealism and its Legacy, a recreation of a 1920s curator’s office filled with evocative objects, artefacts and specimens from ancient and modern culture. Inspired by Mark Dion’s interactions during a residency at Manchester Museum in 2002, the installation serves as a repository for neglected and unclassifiable objects ranging from photographs to intricate drawings, prints and models. According to the artist this work is designed to “provide a fitting setting for the contemplation and study of Surrealism.”

Tate Thames Dig (1998-2000) is presented in the final rooms as an iconic example of Mark Dion’s participatory practice. During the summer of 1998, two years before the launch of Tate Modern in 2000, teenagers, retirees, artists and historians mudlarked on the foreshores of Millbank and Bankside for artefacts at low tide. Led by Dion’s archaeological approach, they unearthed clay pipes, plastic toys, credit cards and animal bones that have been transformed into this poetic display. Documentary photographs of the beachcombers and tidal flow charts are also exhibited. By combining historic and contemporary finds, the work presents a slice of London’s material history over the centuries.

MARK DION: Biography

Mark Dion was born in 1961 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, US and lives in New York with his wife and frequent collaborator Dana Sherwood. He studied at the Hartford Art School, University of Hartford, Connecticut (1981-82), which awarded him a BFA in 1986 and an honorary doctorate in 2002. From 1983 to 1984 he attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and then completed the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (1984-85). He is an Honorary Fellow of Falmouth University, UK (2014) and has an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters (Ph.D.) from The Wagner Free Institute of Science in Philadelphia (2015). Dion has received numerous awards, including the ninth annual Larry Aldrich Foundation Award (2001); The Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2007) and the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Lucida Art Award (2008).  He has had major exhibitions at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2017); Palais des Beaux-Arts, Paris (2016); Natural History Museum, London (2007); Miami Art Museum, Miami (2006); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2004); Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2003) and Tate Gallery, London (1999). For over two decades Dion has worked in the public realm in a wide range of scales, from architecture projects to print interventions in newspapers. Some of his most recent large-scale public projects include David Fairchild’s Laboratory, a permanent installation commissioned for The Kampong, National Tropical Botanical Garden, Coconut Grove, FL (2016); Den, a permanent installation commissioned for the Norway National Tourist Route (2012) and Neukom Vivarium, a permanent outdoor installation and learning lab for the Olympic Sculpture Park commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum (2006); Dion has also produced large-scale permanent commissions for Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany and the Montevideo Biennale in Uruguay (both 2012). His work is held in the collections of Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; The New York Public Library, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York and Tate, London. Dion is co-director of Mildred’s Lane, an innovative visual art education and residency program in Beach Lake, Pennsylvania.

Curators

Exhibition curated by Iwona Blazwick, Director, Whitechapel Gallery with Candy Stobbs, Assistant Curator, Whitechapel Gallery.

Publication

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated publication including an interview between Iwona Blazwick, Director, Whitechapel Gallery and Mark Dion and contributions from Petra Lange-Berndt, Chair of Modern and Contemporary Art, University of Hamburg and Gilda Williams, art critic and lecturer at Goldsmiths College, University of London

Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High St
London E1 7QX
www.whitechapelgallery.org