Modern art and modernist art history largely assented to the ontological and epistemological lie which imagined humanity and the humanities making their own history by themselves, while hiding the fact that their productions, relations, and economy were always teeming with biophysical processes.
The increasing violence by which the limits of the planet, its feedback loops and tipping points, are forcing themselves into world events has profound consequences for how we narrate (art) history and curate exhibitions in the web of life.
New disciplines are broaching the separation between human activities and Earth systems— environmental law, political ecology, ecological economics, and so on. Likewise, what is at issue when artists, curators, exhibitions, and museums venture into new formations and shared rather than adjacent perspectives? What is at stake in a curatorial ecology, an environmental art history, or in integrating socio-natural processes into an institution’s account of itself, and so on?
Turning to a world-systems approach as well as the insights of micro-history, Max Andrews & Mariana Cánepa Luna will present a series of curatorial and artistic perspectives on such questions, drawing from “uncomfortable objects” and “dishonest research” across their exhibitions 4.543 billion. The matter of matter (2017–2018), Greenwashing. Environment: Perils, Promises and Perplexities (2008) and related projects.
This lecture has been organized with the support of SIBUR.
