About | These Entanglements: Ecology After Nature

These Entanglements: Ecology After Nature

 

Petroleum, chemicals, and bacteria have become agents of history. Humanity—or rather, the settler-colonial project—has infiltrated every environment on a molecular level, resulting in anthropogenic climate crisis. In this state of ‘post-nature’, there are no edges; even plastic has invaded our blood streams. Numerous planetary boundaries have been permeated and transgressed, disrupting the self-sustaining life-support system known as Gaia. 

 

These Entanglements: Ecology After Nature thinks with the molecular, the geological, and the biological, and their entanglements with social relations. It brings together Australian and international artists whose works traverse forms such as choreography, sculptural installation, filmmaking, field research, tarot reading, photography, painting, and virtual simulation. Drawing on cross-disciplinary discourses, the exhibition explores theories of deep ecology, new materialism, and posthumanism, and is indebted to embodied knowledges and First Nations’ kinship systems.

 

Working from the increasingly urgent premise that human exceptionalism has led to environmental catastrophe, the exhibition proposes a more ethical and reciprocal approach to cross-species relations and ways of being in the world. It asks: How can we be attentive to entangled organisms within the biosphere?  What can we learn from fungal networks, bacteria, and trees? How can we refute the nature/culture binary and decentre the human subject in solidarity with the more-than-human?

 

Following non-binary philosopher Timothy Morton, the exhibition problematises how nature is represented and conceptualised. It proposes ecology as an entangled web of relations, a mesh composed of living and non-living beings. Petroleum is derived from crushed dinosaur bones, while iron and oxygen are both byproducts of bacterial metabolism. These Entanglements: Ecology After Nature attunes with an ecological awareness that Morton terms ‘the symbiotic real’.

 

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body. 

 

Artists: Alicia Frankovich, Caitlin Franzmann, Norton Fredericks, John Gerrard, Simryn Gill, Gabriella Hirst, Angelica Mesiti, Betty Muffler and Maringka Burton, Open Spatial Workshop (Terri Bird, Bianca Hester, and Scott Mitchell), Alexandra Pirici, Susan Schuppli, Yasmin Smith, James Tylor. 

 

Guest Curator: Anna Briers

Coordinating Curator: Kyle Weise

Curatorial: Sachi Orrock, Al Poiner, Jocelyn Flynn

Production: Emma Gardner, Jasper Coleman, Llewellyn Milhouse

Registration: Effie Skoufa-Klesnik, Sean Rafferty, Emily Maloney, Morgan Tasker

Graphic Design: Marilena Hewitt

Installation: Briony Law, Jose Pincheira, Kim Demuth, Phil John Garozzo, Kinly Grey, Freddy Komp