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"Atlas of Anti-Taxonomies" 2019-22

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Alicia Frankovich

Born 1980, Tauranga, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne, Victoria. Pronouns: she/her.

 

"Atlas of Anti-Taxonomies" 2019–22

16 dye-sublimation prints on PVC backlit polyester, steel, cords, SD video, colour

 

Commissioned by Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, Christchurch, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Courtesy of the artist, Starkwhite Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland and 1301SW Naarm/Melbourne and Gadigal Country/Sydney.

 

Atlas of Anti-Taxonomies questions fixed ideas about nature, proposing the de-categorisation of the world. Through the visual language of this installation, Alicia Frankovich suggests alternative ways of seeing and image-making in the Anthropocene—a term rethought by Donna Haraway as the ‘Capitalocene’ or ‘Chthulucene’.

 

Depicting over 100 found and constructed images, Frankovich messes with anthropocentric hierarchies, dispelling the notion of nature as a backdrop for human activity as opposed to an interdependent, self-sustaining system. Images of orange peel, rocks, genome sequences, ant eyes, plants, flowers, bacteria, and planetary space meet with views of the body through medical imaging and the molecular. Life melds with non-life. Symbiotic organisms such as lichen and fungi coalesce with climate phenomena.

 

These unexpected montages muddy and reassign relationships, entangling the human and non-human. This commingling of matter speaks to our porosity with ecological planetary systems that are, in fact, borderless—anti-taxonomical. Taxonomy is the practice and science of categorisation, often prescribed by heteronormative and colonial power structures. Atlas of Anti-Taxonomies reorders Western knowledge systems, drawing on research by Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith and art historian Aby Warburg’s unfinished Mnemosyne Atlas (1924-29).

 

Frankovich’s screen-based mode of display borrows its visual language from the internet browser, a site of all-at-once-ness, information overload, and overlapping hierarchies. The world wide web, akin to the ‘wood-wide web’, resembles a neural network of relations. This non-linear, non-Western mode of thinking undoes the binaries between nature and culture that have created the conditions for our climate crisis.

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

 

Alicia Frankovich acknowledges that this work was made on the stolen lands of First Nations peoples, including:  

In Australia:

  • Woiwurrung, Boonwurrung and Wathaurong peoples of the Kulin nation in South Victoria 

  • Gadubanud of the Eastern Maar peoples in South Victoria 

  • Bidawal, Dhudhuroa, Gunaikurnai, and Jaithmathang peoples in Northeast Victoria

  • Ngarigo Monero peoples of Southeast New South Wales and Northeast Victoria

  • Mitambuta and Taungurung peoples in Northern Victoria

  • Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples in the Australian Capital Territory

  • Peramangk people in South Australia 

  • Gadigal people of the Eora nation in New South Wales.

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In Aotearoa:

  • The Waikato-Tainui iwi of Ngarunui Beach, Raglan 

  • The Ngāti Whātua iwi of Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland 

 

The work is exhibited on Yuggera and Turrbal Country.
The artist pays her respects to their ancestors and descendants. 

 

Several images in this work were produced with the following centres: The Centre for Advanced Microscopy, Advanced Imaging Precinct, Australian National University, part of Microscopy Australia, thanks to Daryl Webb; The University of Sydney School of Life and Environmental Sciences, thanks to Associate Professor Timothy Newsome and Liam Howell, and Anjali Gowripalan, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian National University.

 

This work contains four images used under a creative commons license: 

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