Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA)
at New York University Shanghai
25 March – 29 May 2021
 
With

• Agency
• Anne Duk Hee Jordan
  with Pauline Doutreluingne
• John Feldman
  with Lynn Margulis
• Mao Chenyu
• Maximilian Prüfer
• Monika Lin
  with Zaanheh Project

In a recent essay addressing the intersectional frictions of the novel coronavirus pandemic, the climate crisis, and recent microbiome research, the philosopher Tobias Rees remarked, “We humans are really little more than a multi-species ecosystem among multi-species ecosystems—ponds among ponds.” Borrowing this as an umbrella term for rethinking the relationship between organisms and their various endo- and exo-somatic ecologies, ponds among ponds: an exhibition of threshold behavior & nested life proposes an alternative approach to the presentation of natural history. Instead of beginning from the assumption that the organism is the basic unit of evolution, what if we consider the multi-scalar, nested ecologies of life as symbiotic sequences that challenge ideas of competition and survival of the fittest? The fundamental proposition of ponds among ponds is that the current concept of organismic life is insufficient for thinking with and adapting to contemporary climate and biodiversity crises.

Thinking with the pathbreaking work of evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis (1938–2011), ponds among ponds presents objects, images, texts, performances, and movements through artistic points of view, troubling current forms and proposing other organizations of life. The concept of “threshold behavior” contends that all organisms are ecologies unto themselves that operate as assemblages ordered and kept alive by various environmental gradients. While “nested life” challenges the predominant image of climate change as an eventuality wherein an organism (typically, a human organism), as a unit of coherent and sovereign volition, struggles against the outside forces of nature. Such an impoverished sense of threshold behavior leads to a repetition without difference. Instead, in order to begin to conceive of, and thereby adapt to, the massive challenges of climate change (and the no less imperiling situation of biodiversity destruction), it is necessary to imagine the human, and the organism, as ecologies within ecologies, or ponds among ponds.

Central to the exhibition, in its performance-installation, Brussels-based Agency calls forth gatherings and discussion around controversial intellectual property cases, raising questions such as: are living things patentable subject matter? A video by Maximilian Prüfer explores the consequences of environmental destruction upon the pollination process within agriculture, while Berlin-based artist Anne Duk Hee Jordan, in her collaboration with Pauline Doutreluingne, has developed a multimedia wedding bed-installation, opening a nonlinear perspective on species migration and the botany of desire. Shanghai and Yueyang-based artist Mao Chenyu’s further invokes the figure of the agricultural worker and space-time of Chinese rural society in two films, one of which will premiere at the close of the exhibition. Extending the exhibition out into the city, walking maps designed by Zaanheh Project’s Monika Lin invite visitors to key areas around Shanghai to think with the emergent ecologies of the local watershed. Finally, Reassembling the Natural the exhibition, conceptually and materially, with traces of Lynn Margulis and her collaborators: A curatorial station entitled “Reassembling Symbiosis” includes a documentary film directed by John Feldman exploring her life and ideas (accessible online throughout the duration of the exhibition); the gallery is also lined with curtains (entitled “Reassembling the Outside”), designed by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin in collaboration with Wolfgang Hückel and produced by the ICA team, which prompt visitors to imagine the gallery as a symbiont with the city of Shanghai, imagining the curtain as a permeable membrane between inside and outside, art and nature.

For ponds among ponds, exhibition curators Springer and Turpin (Reassembling the Natural) have worked with the ICA at NYU Shanghai to engage with local collections, museums, and related sites of scientific research, as well as artists and cultural producers. By bringing these respective objects of research together in one exhibition space, their project continues to work across disciplines and develop new modes of spatial juxtaposition and curatorial montage that enable scientific and aesthetic practices of inquiry to inform one another.

ponds among ponds: an exhibition of threshold behavior & nested life and its related events are presented as the final season of The (Invisible) Garden, the ICA’s 2019–21 artistic research program that inquires into the garden as a method that shapes our understanding of Nature and our relationships to other species. From Fall 2019 through Spring 2021, the ICA at NYU Shanghai presents artists, thinkers, and practitioners, through exhibitions and events, to consider the garden and ask how might we denature Nature?

The exhibition was curated by Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin (Reassembling the Natural), and was organized by ICA director & curator Michelle Yeonho Hyun with Zhu Sicong, who were assisted by Chen Yijiao, Wang Yuxin, Chen Yindi, and Qin Xiaoyan.

Documents & Resources

• ica.shanghai.nyu.edu/ponds-among-ponds/exhibition&events
• Exhibition poster and curatorial essay (PDF in English & Chinese)
• Exhibition floorplan and artwork contextualizations (PDF in English & Chinese)
• Press release (PDF in English & Chinese)
  
• “From the Anthropocene to the Microbiocene,” essay by Tobias Rees in Noema, 2020
• Read an article about the exhibition & its concerns on the NYU website

Related Events in the Gallery & Online

ponds among ponds: an exhibition of threshold behavior & nested life is accompanied by related events, including:

VIRTUAL SCREENING: Symbiotic Earth

20 March –29 May
Online

The documentary film Symbiotic Earth (dir. John Feldman, 2018) explores the life and ideas of evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, whose unconventional theories challenged the male-dominated scientific community and are today fundamentally changing how we look at ourselves, evolution, and the environment.

The film is available for screening online one week prior to and throughout the exhibition period. English with Chinese subtitles.

TALK: Roundtable with curators, artists, & scientists

Sat, 27 Mar, 16:00–17:30 CST
Online Chinese and English

Join the curators and artists in conversation with scientists from NYU Shanghai, DONG Ningning (Fudan University), Sascha Krause (East China Normal University), PAN Yan (Fudan University), and ZHANG Minhua (East China Normal University), as they discuss the exhibition ponds among ponds and film Symbiotic Earth. The lm is available for screening online one week prior to the roundtable discussion, starting on 20 March.

PERFORMANCE: Agency

Agency is an international initiative founded by Kobe Matthys that has o ces in Brussels. Since 1992, Agency constitutes a growing “list of boundary things” mostly derived from judicial cases and controversies involving intellectual property. Agency calls these boundary things forth via varying “assemblies” such as exhibitions, performances, and publications. For Assembly (ponds among ponds), Agency calls an assembly where a group of concerned from various back- grounds related to the case will be invited to respond to the controversy it raises. This assembly is not meant to re-enact the judgment, but rather to evoke the hesitation experienced in court.

Assembly (ponds among ponds)
Sat, 17 Apr, 16:00–18:00 CST
Online (link coming soon)
English with Chinese interpretation

Agency calls forth from its list Thing 000773 (Pseudomonas). For thousands of years cow dung slurry has been used in India in rituals to clean houses. In 1971, microbiologist Ananda Chakrabarty grew bacteria (of the pseudomonas family) by genetic transfer, which he hoped would be used to clean oil spills, and in 1972, he filed for a patent application. The case eventually appeared before the highest court in the US, raising the question: are “living things” patentable subject matter?

Assembly (ponds among ponds)
Sat, 15 May, 16:00–18:00 CST Gallery (limited seating)
Chinese with English interpretation

Agency calls forth an assembly for a newly researched case, which has been developed specifically for ponds among ponds at the ICA at NYU Shanghai. Please register by 7 May to reserve a seat.

SCREENING & TALK: Anti-Rural China

22–29 May (virtual screening; link coming soon)
Sat, 29 May, 15:00 CST (in-person screening in the Gallery; limited seating; Chinese with English subtitles Sat, 29 May, 16:00–17:00 CST (conversation; online & ICA GAllery; Chinese with English interpretation)

Watch the premiere of Mao Chenyu’s newest film, Anti-Rural China (2021), followed by a conversation with the filmmaker, curators, and theoretician Lu Xinghua. In response to Fei Xiaotong’s once banned and now widely-read study of Chinese rural society, From the Soil (1947), Mao questions From the Soil’s legacy, asking how to think about the rural reality of China today and open up thinking for the future?

Anti-Rural China is available for screening online one week prior to the conversation. Online viewers are welcome to join the 29 May conversation via live stream.The film will also be screened in person, in the ICA gallery, followed immediately by a conversation with the filmmaker. Please register by 21 May to reserve a seat.

As with every season, the ICA will host Study Sessions on 8 April and 29 April at 13:00 in the ICA gallery. ICA Study Sessions are guided conversations focusing on one work in one hour, based on curious exploration, critical reflection, and collective meaning making.

Registration is required for all events.

Exhibition Colophon

Participanting Artists

• Agency
• Anne Duk Hee Jordan
  with Pauline Doutreluingne
• John Feldman
  with Lynn Margulis
• Mao Chenyu
• Maximilian Prüfer
• Monika Lin
  with Zaanheh Project

Scientific Interlocutors

• Dong Ningning (Fudan University)
• Sascha Krause (East China Normal University)
• Pan Yan (Fudan University)
• WANG Zhenghuan (East China Normal University)
• Zhang Minhua (East China Normal University)

Curators, Team & Collaborators

ponds among ponds was curated by Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin, and was organized by Michelle Yeonho Hyun with Zhu Sicong, who were assisted by Chen Yijiao, Wang Yuxin, Chen Yindi, and Qin Xiaoyan. Additional assistance by Lina Jin from NYU Shanghai Teaching Labs and He Zhuqing from the Biological History Museum of East China Normal University. Design by the curators in collaboration with Wolfgang Hückel and The Exercises / Lu Liang with Selina Landis.

ponds among ponds: an exhibition of threshold behaviour & nested life and its related events are presented as the final season of The (Invisible) Garden, the ICA’s 2019–21 artistic research program that inquires into the garden as a method that shapes our understanding of Nature and our relationships to other species. From Fall 2019 through Spring 2021, the ICA at NYU Shanghai presents artists, thinkers, and practitioners, through exhibitions and events, to consider the garden and ask how might we denature Nature?

Select artworks and projects in the exhibition have been generously supported by: in part, the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Flanders Ministry of Culture, Youth, and Media; and, in kind, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

Thank You :

Reassembling the Natural thanks Michelle Yeonho Hyun for the generous invitation and meticulous production over long distance throughout a year and a half of pandemic chaos. We also thank the ICA team, above all Zhu Sicong, for their tireless research and production support, as well as all participating artists, scientists, and contributors, and all staff, fabricators, technicians, and translators of NYU Shanghai who helped make the exhibition happen.

The curators would also like to thank:

Lidia Gasperoni, Martin Guinard, Wolfgang Hückel, Bettina Korintenberg, and Bruno Latour

ponds among ponds was curated by Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin, and was organized by ICA director & curator Michelle Yeonho Hyun with Zhu Sicong, who were assisted by Chen Yijiao, Wang Yuxin, Chen Yindi, and Qin Xiaoyan.

• ica.shanghai.nyu.edu/ponds-among-ponds/exhibition&events

intercalations 6 … is a queer refrain, populated with both acoustical lines of flight and the sorrows of captivity, wherein the reader-as-exhibition-viewer learns that the adventure of ornithology is as preoccupied with the evolutionary meaning of allopreening among avifauna as it is with their taxonomical domination. ── With contributions creating a kaleidoscopic murmuration of minor ornithologies, including contributions on feathers, flight, song, loss, escape, and evasion, as well as a series of object lessons, poetic reflections, short stories, visual essays, and theoretical reflections on birds from Aristotle to Anaïs Nin, among many others.

These Birds of Temptation. Edited by Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin.

English
13 x 21 cm
436 pages
Color & black/white images
Softcover, thread-bound
ISBN 978-3-9818635-4-3

Published by K. Verlag and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin in December 2021

intercalation 5 … is a book of provocations wherein the reader-as-exhibition-viewer learns that the “head,” despite its interminable rule over the body, necessarily underestimates the sophistication of corporeal desire when such desire is unleashed in accord with the principles of a general economy. ── With contributions addressing a wide spectrum of headlessness and its many operational forms, from the invention of the guillotine to the maintenance of the museum repository, from annual shareholder reports to Indigenous sovereignty struggles, and from neuroscientific advancements to brain surgery narratives, as well as the housing crisis, ocean pollution, settlement and cerealization, wheat banks, political murder, human extinction, and much more.

Decapitated Economies. Edited by Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin. With contributions by D.T. Cochrane, Amanda DeLisio and Jason S. Cipparone, Armin Linke, MAP Office, Jeff Monaghan, Skye Moret, Joel Tauber, Etienne Turpin, and many others. Design in collaboration with Katharina Tauer.

English
13 x 21 cm
436 pages
Color & black/white images
Softcover, thread-bound
ISBN 978-3-9818635-3-6

Published by K. Verlag and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in February 2022

The intercalations: a paginated exhibition series is published in cooperation with Haus der Kulturen der Welt; it is made possible by Schering Stiftung

Convening artists from all over the world, this screening is inspired by the practice of silvopasture. Silvopasture is an integrated, holistic approach to agriculture and forestry that allows all types of organisms involved to benefit in mutual ways, forming a balance that supports and co-nourishes each participant across various scales. A tradition of living-with familiar to Indigenous communities on all continents, silvopasture is an act of resistance and sustenance that understands planetary life as compositional and collective.

As a complementary approach, silvoculture resonates with independent publishing as a dynamic and collaborative practice nurtured by reciprocity, multiplication, and (re-)distribution; gathering and cultivating ecologies of careful attention, knowing, and sensing on varying scales, from the smallness of a single letter, word, or image to bigger assemblages like the book, a visual sequence, a print-run, a group of positions and voices, a shelf, a book fair, or the world.

In this spirit, the pieces shared by comrades in silvopasture works address survival and disappearance from many different vantage points, some using a more documentary approach, while others offer more poetic interventions. Together, the works in print, video, and photography suggest repertoires of interdependence in both love and struggle.

Featuring work by:

Elisa Balmaceda
Rosa Barba
Priyanka Basu & Steve Rowell
Carolina Borrero Arias
Dora García
Ana Hupe
Geraldine Juárez
Armin Linke
Hanna Mattes
Martina Pozzan
Ela Spalding
Joel Tauber
Raul Walch
Tania Willard

Thanks to all participants for the wonderful collaboration and to Eveline Wüthrich for the beautiful opportunity.

DETAILED PROGRAM (PDF)

Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest
opens on 19 October, 19h00
Zentralmagazin Naturwissenschaftlicher Sammlungen
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle/Wittenberg
Domplatz 4
D-06108 Halle/Saale

With:
Maria Thereza Alves, Ari Bayuaji, Ursula Biemann, Bik Van der Pol, Shannon Lee Castleman/Migrant Ecologies, Revital Cohen & Tuur van Balen, Mark Dion, Radjawali Irendra/Akademi Drone Indonesia, Armin Linke mit Giulia Bruno und Giuseppe Ielasi, Barbara Marcel, Julian Oliver & Crystelle Vu, PetaBencana.id, SHIMURAbros, Paulo Tavares/autonoma, and Robert Zhao Renhui/The Institute of Critical Zoologists

Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest confronts traditional images of nature in the context of species mass extinction, deforestation, and climate change.

Drawing connections from Alfred Russel Wallace’s mid-nineteenth century expeditions to Amazonia and the Malay Archipelago to current issues of environmental transformation, the exhibition presents 14 works of contemporary art alongside rare botanical and zoological specimens. Together, inherited notions of nature are challenged to critically inquire into the legacies resulting from the relentless destruction of highly complex ecosystems. Installations, photographs, films, and sculptures reflect on biodiversity suspended between science and monoculture.

Some of the artworks were developed through journeys to Brazil and Indonesia; others address the role of specimens and museum collections. Spending time on Borneo, Java, and Sumatra, photographer and filmmaker Armin Linke—together with his colleague Giulia Bruno and exhibition curators Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin—conducted numerous interviews with local residents, plantation workers, small land holders, environmentalists, government officials, and scientists. The result is a cinematic document that reflects the speed with which Indonesia is currently transforming into a palm-oil nation amid giant peat fires. With her 19-channel video installation To See the Forest Standing, Maria Thereza Alves invites us to listen to the 34 Indigenous clan chiefs, whom she accompanied for one month last summer in Brazil while participating in a workshop on Indigenous agroforestry and resource conservation. Meanwhile, Revital Cohen & Tuur van Balen look inward and examine taxidermy birds-of-paradise with piercing X-ray vision, while the automated multimedia installation Extinction Gong by Julian Oliver & Crystelle Vũ translates the IUCN Red List of Endangered Species into an eerie and percussive rhythm in real-time. A highlight of this iteration of the exhibition is a selection of rare bird specimens from Indonesia collected by Alfred Russel Wallace that were recently discovered in the collection of the bird museum Museum Heineanum in Halberstadt, Saxony-Anhalt.

One-hundred and sixty years after Wallace deciphered the principle of species evolution during his journeys, Disappearing Legacies asks whether the living legacy of evolution and biodiversity—forests and the infinity of worlds they sustain—will disappear amidst the mass extinction of species current taking place on this planet.

Participating artists:
Maria Thereza Alves, Ari Bayuaji, Ursula Biemann, Bik Van der Pol, Shannon Lee Castleman/Migrant Ecologies, Revital Cohen & Tuur van Balen, Mark Dion, Radjawali Irendra/Akademi Drone Indonesia, Armin Linke mit Giulia Bruno und Giuseppe Ielasi, Barbara Marcel, Julian Oliver & Crystelle Vu, PetaBencana.id, SHIMURAbros, Paulo Tavares/autonoma, Robert Zhao Renhui/The Institute of Critical Zoologists

Verschwindende Vermächtnisse: Die Welt als Wald
[ Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest ]
20 October – 14 December 2018
Zentralmagazin Naturwissenschaftlicher Sammlungen
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle/Wittenberg
Domplatz 4
D-06108 Halle/Saale

Contact:
+49(0)345 55-21437
koordination@zns.uni-halle.de
naturkundemuseum.uni-halle.de

Opening hours:
Wed to Sat 14h00–18h00
Mon, Tue, Sun, and public holidays closed
Entry is free

Verschwindende Vermächtnisse: Die Welt als Wald is a three-part project by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin. The travelling exhibition is realized by Centrum für Naturkunde at the University of Hamburg, where it was on view in the Fall of 2017. In 2018, adapted iterations are presented from 27 April to 26 August 2018 at the project partner, Tieranatomische Theater at Humboldt University in Berlin, and from 20 October until 14 December 2018 at the Zentralmagazin Naturwissenschaftlicher Sammlungen of the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg in Halle/Saale. The exhibition cycle is a cooperation with the Schering Stiftung and the Goethe-Institut Singapore, with additional support through Pro Helvetia and the Graham Foundation. The project is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation.

Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest
Opening: 26 April, 19h00

Tieranatomisches Theater (TA T)
Raum für forschende Ausstellungspraxis
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Philippstraße 12/13
D-10115 Berlin

With:
Maria Thereza Alves, Ari Bayuaji, Bik Van der Pol, Shannon Lee Castleman/Migrant Ecologies, Revital Cohen & Tuur van Balen, Mark Dion, Radjawali Irendra/Akademi Drone Indonesia, Armin Linke mit Giulia Bruno und Giuseppe Ielasi, Barbara Marcel, Julian Oliver & Crystelle Vu, PetaBencana.id, SHIMURAbros, Paulo Tavares/autonoma, and Robert Zhao Renhui/The Institute of Critical Zoologists

Verschwindende Vermächtnisse: Die Welt als Wald [Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest] transforms the Tieranatomisches Theater into an endangered habitat: the forest. The exhibition confronts traditional images of nature in the context of species mass extinction, deforestation, and climate change.

Drawing connections from Alfred Russel Wallace’s mid-nineteenth century expeditions to Amazonia and the Malay Archipelago to current issues of environmental transformation, the exhibition presents 14 works of contemporary art alongside rare botanical and zoological specimens. Together, inherited notions of nature are challenged to critically inquire into the legacies resulting from the relentless destruction of highly complex ecosystems. Installations, photographs, films, and sculptures reflect on biodiversity suspended between science and monoculture.

Some of the artworks were developed through journeys to Brazil and Indonesia; others address the role of specimens and museum collections. Spending time on Borneo, Java, and Sumatra, photographer and filmmaker Armin Linke—together with his colleague Giulia Bruno and exhibition curators Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin—conducted numerous interviews with local residents, plantation workers, small land holders, environmentalists, government officials, and scientists. The result is a cinematic document that reflects the speed with which Indonesia is currently transforming into a palm-oil nation amid giant peat fires. With her 19-channel video installation To See the Forest Standing, Maria Thereza Alves invites us to listen to the 34 Indigenous clan chiefs, whom she accompanied for one month last summer in Brazil while participating in a workshop on Indigenous agroforestry and resource conservation. Meanwhile, Revital Cohen & Tuur van Balen look inward and examine taxidermy birds-of-paradise with piercing X-ray vision, while the automated multimedia installation Extinction Gong by Julian Oliver & Crystelle Vũ translates the IUCN Red List of Endangered Species into an eerie and percussive rhythm in real-time. Another highlight of the exhibition is the 3D digital rendering of a Sumatran rhino skull, an exhibit that emphasizes the tension between scientific knowledge production and de-naturalization. As a CT scan, the skull provides scientists with new data while at the same time drawing public attention to the plight of this highly endangered animal.

One-hundred and sixty years after Wallace deciphered the principle of species evolution during his journeys, Disappearing Legacies asks whether the living legacy of evolution and biodiversity—forests and the infinity of worlds they sustain—will disappear amidst the mass extinction of species current taking place on this planet.

Participating artists:
Maria Thereza Alves, Ari Bayuaji, Bik Van der Pol, Shannon Lee Castleman/Migrant Ecologies, Revital Cohen & Tuur van Balen, Mark Dion, Radjawali Irendra/Akademi Drone Indonesia, Armin Linke mit Giulia Bruno und Giuseppe Ielasi, Barbara Marcel, Julian Oliver & Crystelle Vu, PetaBencana.id, SHIMURAbros, Paulo Tavares/autonoma, Robert Zhao Renhui/The Institute of Critical Zoologists

The exhibition will be accompanied the discursive program HOW ON EARTH? comprising of lectures, discussions, screenings, and guided tours.

Verschwindende Vermächtnisse: Die Welt als Wald
[ Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest ]
27 April – 26 August 2018
Tieranatomisches Theater (TA T)
Raum für forschende Ausstellungspraxis
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Philippstraße 12/13
D-10115 Berlin

Opening hours:
Tue to Sat 14h00–18h00
Mon, Sun, and public holidays closed

Entry is free.

Verschwindende Vermächtnisse: Die Welt als Wald is a three-part project by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin. The travelling exhibition is realized by Centrum für Naturkunde at the University of Hamburg, where it was on view in the Fall of 2017. In 2018, adapted iterations are presented from 27 April to 26 August 2018 at the project partner, Tieranatomische Theater at Humboldt University in Berlin, and from 19 October until 14 December 2018 at the Zentralmagazin Naturwissenschaftlicher Sammlungen of the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg in Halle/Saale. The exhibition cycle is a cooperation with the Schering Stiftung and the Goethe-Institut. The project is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation.

Verschwindende Vermächtnisse: Die Welt als Wald
27. April – 25. August 2018
Tieranatomisches Theater (TA T)
Raum für forschende Ausstellungspraxis
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Philippstraße 12/13
10115 Berlin
 
Many inherited images of nature are no longer adequate given the realities of mass extinction, anthropogenic climate change, and deforestation. Have current forms of land use transformation, ecological disturbance, and species extermination produced a troubled new natural history? The discursive program How on Earth? addresses this and other urgent questions about nature, colonialism, and care in the Anthropocene through a series of lectures, discussions, screenings, and guided tours.
 
28/04   inhabiting nature
15–16h00 Curators’ tours [de/en]
16–19h00 Artists’ talks by Barbara Marcel, Crystelle Vũ, and others; followed by lectures by Shannon Mattern (New School) and Birgit Schneider (Potsdam University) [en]
>>>> detailed program here
 

09/06   imaging & imagining nature
During the Long Night of Science:
19h00 Curators’ tours [de/en] and artist’s talk by Maria Thereza Alves [en]
23h00 Exhibition guided tour [de]
>>>> detailed program here
 

26/06   consuming a planet
20h00 Lectures by researcher Seth Denizen, Max Haiven (Lakehead University), and Shela Sheikh (Goldsmiths) [en]; followed by a screening of Europium, 2014 [en with de subtitles] and a panel discussion with the artist/director Lisa Rave [en]
>>>> detailed program here
 

03/07   becoming extinct
19h30 “Provisioning Crows: Ecologies of Hope in the Mariana Islands,” lecture by environmental philosopher Thom van Dooren (University of Sydney); followed by a screening of Point of No Return, 2015 [en with de subtitles] and a panel discussion with the artist/director Antje Engelmann [en]
>>>> detailed program here

12/08   replicating nature
10 – 19h00 Day trip excursion with Bik Van Der Pol to the artificial Vesuvio at Schloß Wörlitz and the Naumann Ornithological Collection at Museum Köthen [registration required]
>>>> detailed program here
 

24/08   from pulp and paper
19h30 Publication talks with Dubravka Sekulic, Milica Tomic (GAM, TU Graz), Leah Whitman-Salkin (Harvard Design Magazin), and others [en]
>>>> detailed program here
 

25/08   thinking with the earth
During the Long Night of the Museums [ticket required]
18h00 Exhibition guided tour [de]
19h30 Lecture by Hannah Meszaros-Martin (Goldsmiths) [en]
20h15 Lecture by Kenny Cupers (Universität Basel) [en]
21h00 Screening of Thinking Like A Mountain, 2018 [de with en subtitles] followed by a Q&A with the director Alexander Hick and a closing panel with all guests and the exhibition curators [en]
 

23h00 Exhibition guided tour [de]
>>>> detailed program here
 

Entry to the exhibition and the discursive program is free.
 

For events taking place during the Long Night of Science
(9 June, 17–24h00) and the Long Night of the Museums
(25 August, 18–2h00) separate tickets for the Long Nights are required.

Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest
Opening: 9 November 2017, 18h00
Centrum für Naturkunde (CeNak)
Zoologisches Museum Hamburg
Bundesstrasse 52
D-20146 Hamburg

One-hundred and sixty years ago, Alfred Russel Wallace deciphered the principle of species evolution during research trips to South America and Southeast Asia. From 10 November 2017 to 29 March 2018, the special exhibition Verschwindende Vermächtnisse: Die Welt als Wald [Disappearing Legacies: The World as a Forest] confronts the destruction of these tropical habitats in the context of the Anthropocene and mass extinction.

The concept of the project is unique—a hybrid between a historical thematic presentation and a major exhibition of contemporary art, transforming the Zoological Museum im Centrum für Naturkunde (CeNak), University of Hamburg, into a threatened (rain)forest habitat. The centerpiece of the intervention is the presentation of 13 contemporary works of art—including eight new commissions—by Maria Thereza Alves, Ursula Biemann, Bik Van der Pol, Shannon Lee Castleman, Revital Cohen & Tuur van Balen, Mark Dion, Radjawali Irendra / Akademi Drone Indonesia, Armin Linke with Giulia Bruno and Giuseppe Ielasi, Barbara Marcel, Julian Oliver & Crystelle Vũ, Robert Zhao Renhui / The Institute of Critical Zoologists, SHIMURAbros und autonoma / Paulo Tavares.

Some of the works have a direct relation to the University of Hamburg’s collections. Through on-site visits, the artist Robert Zhao Renhui from Singapore, for instance, has further developed his ongoing exploration of our ambiguous relationship with insects by selecting a series of objects from CeNak’s Entomology Collection for his room-size installation. And it was a visit to the Mammalogy Collection that inspired the artist duo Bik Van der Pol to engage in a deeper examination of the phenomenon of nature as a replica situated between reality and fiction.

Other artistic works were developed through journeys to Brazil and Indonesia. Spending time on Borneo, Java, and Sumatra, photographer and filmmaker Armin Linke—together with his colleague Giulia Bruno and exhibition curators Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin—conducted numerous interviews with local residents, plantation workers, small land holders, environmentalists, government officials, and scientists. The result is a cinematic document that reflects the speed with which Indonesia is currently transforming into a palm-oil nation amid giant peat fires. In her museum installation, Maria Thereza Alves lends the word to 33 Indigenous clan chiefs, whom she accompanied for one month last summer in Brazil while participating in a workshop on Indigenous agroforestry and resource conservation. Revital Cohen & Tuur van Balen look inward and examine taxidermy birds with piercing X-ray vision, while the automated multimedia installation Extinction Gong by Julian Oliver & Crystelle Vũ translates the IUCN Red List of Endangered Species into an eerie and percussive rhythm in realtime.

The exhibition is extended by a series of curatorial assemblages, which include specimens from the CeNak’s zoological collections and the botanical collections of the Herbarium Hamburgense that were selected in dialogue with the respective institutions’ scientific curators: skulls, animal skins, spirit specimens, herbarium sheets, and numerous cases of colorful pinned insects. Another special highlight is the 3D digital rendering of a Sumatran rhino skull, produced in collaboration with YXLON International, a Hamburg-based high-resolution industrial CT-scanner developer, and a special data visualization software from Volume Graphics. Other media include exclusive screenings of one of Sir David Attenborough’s earliest BBC documentaries and a selection of videos from the ornithologist Ed Scholes (Cornell Lab of Ornithology) and wildlife photographer Tim Laman’s ambitious Bird-of-Paradise Project.

Together, the artistic positions and curatorial assemblages presented in the exhibition Verschwindende Vermächtnisse: Die Welt als Wald renounce a romantic image of untouched nature, and instead critically inquire into the legacies resulting from the relentless destruction of highly complex ecosystems.

Alongside the exhibition, CeNak offers a variegated event program comprising of guided tours, lectures, screenings, and other evening events. Entry is free.

Verschwindende Vermächtnisse: Die Welt als Wald is a three-part project by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin. The travelling exhibition is realized by Centrum für Naturkunde, University of Hamburg, where it will be on view from 10 November 2017 until 29 March 2018. In 2018, adapted iterations will be presented at the project partners, Tieranatomische Theater (TA T), Humboldt University Berlin, and the Zentralmagazin Naturwissenschaftlicher Sammlungen, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Halle/Saale. The exhibition cycle is a cooperation with the Schering Stiftung and the Goethe-Institut. Ursula Biemann’s participation is supported by Pro Helvetia. The project is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation.

The Trees typeface used in the graphic design is an open-source project by Katie Holten (2015).

Exhibition photographed by Michael Pfisterer

intercalations 4 … creates a space for the reader-as-exhibition-viewer to consider how forests may be seen not only for their trees, but also how they can enable experiences of elegance, affirmation, and creation for a multitude of creatures; in response to their violent destruction, which characterizes the Anthropocene, these pages traverse various woodlands by way of their semiotic, socio-political, historical, and epistemic incitements in order to reveal how practices of care, concern, and attention also enable humans to inhabit and flourish in this world as forest.

The Word for World is Still Forest is an homage to the forest as a turbulent, interconnected, multinature. It moves from concepts of the forest as a thinking organism to the linear monocultural plantations that now threaten the life of global forests. The volume opens with a series of facsimile pages from Ursula K. Le Guin’s eponymous novella The Word for World is Forest from 1972, for which the editors scanned their personal, marked-up copy for excerpts that now read like poetic, urgent pledges. In a provocative essay, the artist Pedro Neves Marques shares his understanding of the particularity of Amerindian images of naturecultures. Architectural historian and curator Dan Handel then presents an excerpted exhibition on “wood” as a vital element of forest mythology and the driver of industrial resource management. Alongside data visualizations by arborealist Kevin Beiler, Canadian forest ecologist Suzanne Simard explains how trees are connected by the “wood wide web” and describes how the Mother Trees of British Columbia distribute nutrients through an underground mycorrhizal fungi network. Media designer and data curator Yanni A. Loukissas adds a series of reflections on botanical data from Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum. In her intriguing photo series, Shannon Lee Castleman visualizes illegal logging, incremental harvesting practices, and ghostly hauntings in the diminished tropical forests of Indonesia. Nonuya elder and shaman Abel Rodríguez also shares Indigenous worldviews and spirituality by relaying an oral narrative of the Ancestral Tree of Plenty in a piece transcribed and translated in collaboration with Carlos Rodríguez and Catalina Vargas from the Tropen Bos International Colombia forest conservation group. Abel’s deep knowledge and understanding of the forest also emanates from the beautiful drawings of medicinal plants and wet and dry seasons in the Amazon. Brazilian architect and activist Paulo Tavares continues to address human rights violations and Indigenous struggle in Amazonia as he highlights the hybrid literacies required by resistance groups in defense of their land against dispossession and epistemicide. In the interview “Leaving the Forest,” anthropologist Eduardo Kohn discusses the meaning of perspectival multinatural semiotics following his time with the Kichua in Ecuador. Finally, the book concludes with two episodes from Berlin, where the book was produced: architect and neighborhood activist Silvan Linden portrays a case study of Berlin’s controversial urban “wild,” and landscape architect and photographer Sandra Bartoli reverently illuminates the little-known history of the oldest trees surviving in the Tiergarten, Berlin’s central park and former royal hunting forest. Throughout the book, artist Katie Holten’s “Tree Alphabet” evokes connections between the book and its arboreal origins.

The Word for World is Still Forest. Edited by Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin. With contributions by Sandra Bartoli, Kevin Beiler, Shannon Castleman, Dan Handel, Katie Holten, Silvan Linden, Yanni A. Loukissas, Eduardo Kohn, Pedro Neves Marques, Abel Rodríguez, Carlos Rodríguez, Suzanne Simard, Anna-Sophie Springer, Paulo Tavares, Etienne Turpin, and Catalina Vargas Tovar. Design in collaboration with Katharina Tauer

English

232 Pages

13 x 21 cm

41 Color & 37 black/white images

Softcover, thread-bound

ISBN  978-3-9818635-0-5

Published by K. Verlag and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in February 2017

Reviewed by Jason Groves, Open Humanities Press’s Feedback Blog, 13 July 2017.

Fantasies of the Library lets readers experience the library anew. The book imagines, and enacts, the library as both keeper of books and curator of ideas—as a platform of the future. One essay occupies the right-hand page of a two-page spread while interviews scrolls independently on the left. Bibliophilic artworks intersect both throughout the book-as-exhibition. A photo essay, “Reading Rooms Reading Machines” further interrupts the book in order to display images of libraries (old and new, real and imagined), and readers (human and machine) and features work by artists including Kader Atta, Wafaa Bilal, Mark Dion, Rodney Graham, Katie Paterson, Veronika Spierenburg, and others.

The book includes an essay on the institutional ordering principles of book collections; a conversation with the proprietors of the Prelinger Library in San Francisco; reflections on the role of cultural memory and the archive; and a dialogue with a new media theorist about experiments at the intersection of curatorial practice and open source ebooks. The reader emerges from this book-as-exhibition with the growing conviction that the library is not only a curatorial space but a bibliological imaginary, ripe for the exploration of consequential paginated affairs. The physicality of the book—and this book—“resists the digital,” argues coeditor Etienne Turpin, “but not in a nostalgic way.”

With contributions by Erin Kissane, Hammad Nasar, Megan Shaw Prelinger, Rick Prelinger, Anna-Sophie Springer, Charles Stankievech, Katharina Tauer, Etienne Turpin, Andrew Norman Wilson, Joanna Zylinska.

Hardcover | $24.95 Trade | £18.95
ISBN: 9780262035200 | 160 pp.
5.125 x 8.25 in | 30 color illus., 15 b&w illus.
September 2016

Reviewed by Gill Partington, Times Literary Supplement, 18 January 2017, 33.

Reviewed by Jussi Parikka, Leonardo On-Line, 4 April 2017.

29 February – 31 March 2016
Princeton University
Butler College
Princeton, USA

30 April – 18 June 2016
Kilroy Metal Ceiling
283 Greene Ave
Brooklyn, USA

The mixed-media installation A Taxonomy of Palm Oil was first developed for the exhibition 125,660 Specimens of Natural History, Jakarta, 2015. The centerpiece of this installation is a collection of 100 specimens of products containing either palm oil or a palm oil derivative; these samples demonstrate the variety of manufactured goods which use palm oil, and connect every one of their consumer to the deforestation in the tropics.

In Jakarta, these products where all sourced on the Indonesian market; when Eben Kirksey asked to include the project in his exhibition Emergent Ecologies, we produced a new version of the piece based on products that are available to customers in America. As an array of specimens nearly as colorful as those nineteenth-century cases of tropical butterflies or beetles, this collection presents the postnatural commodities annihilating tropical biodiversity in the Anthropocene.

Design & Research Assistants: Robin Hartanto, Widya Ramadhani
Research Assistant: Louis Steven
Layout: Alexandra Berceanu

Our intervention in Unfold: The Volume Project, “The Lesson of Zoology: A Physis is being organized…,” departed from a lithograph, which first appeared during a visit to contemporary Lisbon. While researching the role of Lisbon’s Geographical Society in one of the first planetary colonizations, we happened upon an antiquarian bookshop with seemingly endless piles of natural history prints. Among them, “The Lesson” stood out as an especially compelling meta-image of just what a lesson is—an ordering of nature, by way of presentation, about who intended to possess the earth.

Based on our found image, we decided to itemize the equipment that makes the discursive reality of a lesson compelling and the following eight terms thus structured our “library of folders” in the virtual reading room of Unfold: Organ; Apparatus; Report; Anatomy (Comparative); Professor; Model (Cosmos); Bone; and, Table. We filled these folders with a vast amount of files ranging from book chapters (many of which we scanned ourselves), to video and audio files, reproduction of historical images as well as works of contemporary art.

As a commission within the commission, The Center for PostNatural History in Pittsburgh, co-directed by Rich Pell and Lauren Allen, moreover contributed a selection of archival material from its collection which was digitized especially on the occasion of Unfold#2: The Lesson of Zoology.

Read the project’s introductory essay, by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin with Walter Benjamin.

Read an interview by Sara Giannini with Anna-Sophie and Etienne.

To access the library of the—now archived—project download the .zip file at unfold.thevolumeproject.com > “FOLDED” > UNFOLD #2.