World of Matter opens exhibition in New York
Posted on by Ursula Biemann
James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center, Sept 9 at 6pm
World of Matter
Exhibition: September 10 to November 1, 2014
Participants: Mabe Bethonico, Ursula Biemann, Uwe H. Martin & Frauke Huber, Peter Mörtenböck & Helge Mooshammer, and Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan.
The world we inhabit is expanding. Global population growth, increased mobility, accelerated contacts, rising levels of production and consumption, and the expansion of natural resource extraction have had a significant impact in environmental, social and psychological terms. The research conducted by the artists, journalists and theorists in World of Matter coheres around a sensitive reconsideration of the planet's “resources,” as traders call them. What forms of interaction with the material world acknowledge that there are limits to what we, as humans, might know and control?
Participants in World of Matter draw upon methodologies from the social and natural sciences, journalism, and also poetics and aesthetics, to scrutinize zones of geopolitical-ecological upheaval. Their projects adopt a variety of formats and strategies to delve into relations between humans and the world, in some cases by way of historical narratives, in others, through scientific laboratory research, community collaboration, visualization technologies, or activist organization. These experiments animate an emergent notion of artistic global citizenship, breaking up well-worn patterns of representation by embracing a plethora of aesthetic, conceptual and interventionist engagements with "matter." Many investigations have involved intensive, multiyear fieldwork in sites of heightened material significance, often in collaboration with indigenous communities, to whom the world is not merely a resource for human consumption that needs to be controlled and who are experts in sustainable co-existence.
The works presented in the exhibition engage with the worldwide world of things, as Michel Serres would call it, referring to the entire nonhuman sphere that is excluded from the social contracts regulating the global community and that he argues must be re-addressed in terms of nonhuman subjects with rights, lest more damage be made to the Earth. The non-anthropocentric materialism developed by he and others has inspired the artists' efforts to examine ways in which the world matters physically, aesthetically, and ethically--something that is ever more pertinent, as humanity itself is understood newly to be a geophysical force that impacts life on the planetary scale.
James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue (at 34th Street)
New York
