Author: dig

around which a vast edifice of human responses has arisen

dig

‘… where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result fit into the life of someone, […], who also cared about justice and truth and human rights and how to change the world.”

“… a particular kind of flower around which a vast edifice of human responses has arisen”

“Even as ornament, flowers represent life itself, as fertility, mortality, transience, extravagance, and as such they enter our art, rites, and language.” – Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses.

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Poetics of Relation

dig

Exhibition at Pérez Art Museum Miami, 2015, curated Tumelo Mosaka and Tobias Ostrander.

“Over the past several decades, many artistic investigations of identity have engaged the human figure as the site for negotiating these historical and contemporary dynamics. Representations of the body have often propagated these binary positions by specifically looking to structure, for the viewer, an experience of inclusion or exclusion from the cultural identities depicted.
Our attraction as curators to the writings of Glissant and his theory of Relation derives from the richly nonbinary character of his articulation of identity. His interest in multiplicity and the stress he places on seeking encounters with an other-or with many others as an integral part of our own understanding of self feels congruent with our contemporary moment. His emphasis on our “mutual mutations by this interplay of relations,” resonates in a globalized world defined by migrations that merge our varied homelands with one another and with foreign, often conflicting contexts. Landscape, as a subject and form through which to address identity, offers unique and perhaps more open-ended aesthetic options for artists to pursue currently. Compared with figuration, landscape can offer greater points of entry today and multiple layers of signification to both artists and viewers. As the artworks in this exhibition demonstrate, the form can subtly generate the experience of both beauty and trauma simultaneously, of histories negotiated and lived in the present and understood as representations of identities in continual flux and formation.” – Tobias Ostrander.

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… site for the lyrical arrangement of forms.

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Interview -Beatriz Cortez and Candice Lin

CORTEZ: In your work there’s a certain irreverence towards the Western humanist concept of the human as sacred. It is one of the things about your work that blows my mind. It makes me think not in terms of hyper objects but micro-objects: about all the worlds that already live inside our bodies and about how our bodies will disperse, not only to become cosmic dust but also to become lots of microbes and nutrients for other bodies, and not only when we become compost but also as we move around, each of us a porous body secreting its liquids throughout the world.

LIN: That is really fascinating that you are thinking about “what is not meant for us” as a way to shift scale, to think of justice beyond the political human sphere. I usually associate such scalar arguments, such as the idea that the Earth will survive us but we will not survive what we’ve done to the Earth, as arguments for nonaction—apolitical inertia. But you seem to be activating this reframing as a way to care more, to be more invested, while aware that we are neither master nor subject of the narratives unfolding. This reminds me of something that seems like a contradiction but perhaps is not, that I have been thinking about in both of our work. I think we share a desire or openness to learn from the materials—how they resist us, what their will asserts, and how we might embrace things that rust, mold, or change as part of the work.