To mark the end of 2012, SYNAPSE.info initiated a curators’ questionnaire, sent to the first round of SYNAPSE curators, who participated in 2011.
This is part 3 of 3.
Timur Si-Qin, “Mainstream” (2012)
Anthropocene-related topics such as climate change, technological breakthroughs, and developments in medicine and biotechnology were particularly present in the media this year. How did your engagement with the topic change over 2012?
“During 2012 I had the chance to develop – in cooperation with Elena Agudio, whom I met through Synapse – a project focusing on the interlacing of art and science: Entering the Mind’s I, a group exhibition organized on the occasion of the International Conference for Human Brain Mapping held in June 2012 in Beijing. The exhibition, focusing on the work of a group of artists from different backgrounds, faced the same issues pointed out by the scientific community invited to the symposium: the (im)possibility to define one’s identity, the unlimited potential of the brain as well as its highly unpredictable and not-yet-fully-explored nature. This chance provided me the inspiration to deepen the dialogue with the scientific community and conceive my practice in a less self-oriented way, by trying to blur the line between different disciplines and approaches.”
– Manuela Lietti
“I am curator and artistic director of a Platform for contemporary art and neuroscience in Berlin, the AoN, collaborating with Charité Hospital + University of Medicine and with the Humboldt Berlin School of Mind and Brain. Thus, I have to say, my engagement with medicine and science started more than 4 years ago. But this year my research focused with more emphasis on the human body, and on its perception across cultures and disciplines. I collaborated with Christina Lammer and Artur Zmijewski on the project “Anatomy Lesson” conceived for the Berlin Biennale, inviting pediatric neurosurgeon Ulrich W. Thomale to participate in a drawing performance and workshop where the doctor was asked to describe his perception of the human body of his patients (as Lammer did with other medical doctors too, trying to understand how much doctors are seeing the body of patients as an object of their work or as a subject). Moreover I invited Beijing based curator Manuela Lietti to collaborate on an exhibition organized for the Organization of Human Brain Mapping (this year organized in Beijing) and to write the text ”Some reflections on the Chinese notion of Self.”
I am than working and researching on body perception and space, proprioception and embodiment issues.”
– Dr. Elena Agudio
Martin Beck, Panel 2: “Nothing better than a touch of ecology and catastrophe to unite the social classes…” (Installation View, 2008)
“My engagement with this topic has been ongoing since 2009, involving reading the literature on posthumanism as well as observing the spectacle that is the current mediated debate on climate change between climate change ‘deniers’ and activists.
Two points.
1. As someone inspired by Fernand Braudel’s longue durée historiography, I think it is important to place the concepts of humanity and climate change in a different perspective from that of the courte durée (short term). So, climate change is nothing new, the climate has been changing as long as the planet has been in existence; we have had ice ages as well as phases of ‘global warming.’ Yet there is a sense in contemporary discourse that the climate change of our generation is something caused more or less by humans (as distinct from ‘nature’). This appears to be an unjustified attribution of causal agency to humans.
2. Apropos the notion of the Anthropocene, it is debatable whether or not the short span of human existence (as a species) justifies such a periodization. It also appears to be associated with a very problematic concept of the human, namely the human as somehow divorced from nature, and transcendent over animality. To return to the climate change topic, there is an assumption that we humans, unlike other animals, have done things to ‘distort’ the natural order, as though we ourselves were not an expression of nature. Only we humans are capable of acting against nature, because it seems we have transcended the realm of our animal nature. Here, one is tempted to say (tweaking Latour’s excellent phrase on the modern) Nous n’avons jamais été humains – We have never been human.”
– Leon Tan
Iain Ball, RARE EARTH SCULPTURES [Cerium], 2012
“I’m particularly interested in how artists have used new technologies as platforms for a new social and political critique, even and especially regarding those very technologies. Notable examples include Gretta Louw, Eva and Franco Mattes, Owen Mundy and Igor Štromajer with digital technologies and Brandon Ballengée, Anna Dimitriu, Rich Pell and Hacketaria with biology and biotechnology. Another interesting current is an interest in the science of food as developed by the Center for Genomic Gastronomy. During the year I’ve gathered notes and links that I’ve found of interest and published hem on the blog http://alternativedocumenta.tumblr.com. I am also preparing for the upcoming MutaMorphosis conference in Prague in December, where so many interesting people are coming together: http://mutamorphosis.org/2012/”
– Christian de Lutz
Earlier this year in September I attended the symposium, “Designing for the Anthropocene: Climate, Food and Health” at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the National University in Singapore. Le Tuong Vi and I (as our persona, Vile/Rats) presented our preliminary investigation into the curious life of minerals in “Neither Animal nor Vegetable”.
http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/sts/newsevents/e_anthropocene.html
In June 2013, I will be showing new work in a solo show at the Hue Arts Space in Paju, Korea. The title of the show, naturally, will be “The Anthropocene”.
– Richard Streitmatter-Tran
Still from television show The Big Picture (1953-1963)
“My curatorial engagement with this topic was actually minimal. I could point out my recent research which will be finished at the end of this year. It deals with the garden scenery in installation arts. The gardening is one of the eldest culture phenomenon reflecting the relationship between human and nature; called “Third Nature”. I examined the artistic strategies of three artists, Marcel Broodthaers, Olafur Eliasson and Roman Ondak whose installations find a reflection in their architectural form or in the choice of organic and natural materials in the tradition of the garden and gardening. “
– Keumhwa Kim
“I attach a final draft of a text/lecture I gave in Linz and then Bremen this year that refer to two projects 2006 – 2012:
http://www.programonline.de/nonspheres.html
http://www.luisberriosnegron.org/12-06_PR+LBN-3ingD13/12-06_PR3ingFinal.html”
– Luis Barrios-Negron
“What concerns me are the limits of subjective (individual?) agency in relation to those critical issues. How can one develop truly effective means of negotiating with matters that happen in a super-human scale?”
– Gabriel Menotti
Barbara Kruger, “(Untitled) We Won’t Play Nature to Your Culture” (1983)
“My engagement with the topic has in no way been influenced. Not by the media and not in 2012… climate change, technological breakthroughs, and developments in medicine happen every year. I mean the Anthropocene has been on many peoples’ lips since Crutzen, Stoemer and a few others threw this on the table.
I must also say I am very sceptical about this Anthropocene hype in the art world. Why should Anthropocene be all of a sudden more present in the arts than Gravitation or Osmosis? I mean, I have hardly seen exhibits on the latter phenomena.
As a curator with a natural science and engineering background, I tend to look at such issues with a very critical eye, as I do observe a lot of smattering when some curators deal with such issues. So instead of sticking to the contemporary expressions and interpretations of Anthropocene, I will like to draw attention to the like of Antonio Stoppani and others who described similar phenomena of the human’s effects on the Earth some 140 years ago.”
– Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung
“I have come to realize that our narratives of earth history and our conception of man’s relation to earth have very intricate social and political histories. As a historian, I find this a fascinating chapter in the history of science. As a member of the Green Left party in the Netherlands, I struggle with the question how one can make such insights instrumental for a new engagement with information on the destruction of the earth, especially in a world that seems over-saturated with warnings of climate change.”
– Flora Lysen