Forms of Entanglement

The end of worlds starts with not-caring.
Zoe Todd

The world doesn’t environ us, it passes through us. What we inhabit inhabits us. What surrounds us constitutes us.
The Invisible Committee

We live in a time of radical transformations of the life and life-giving processes of the planet. Climate change, toxic waste and acidification of the oceans as well as the growing production of plastic and mono-cultural industrialized agriculture are entangled into the fine mesh of the web of life.

These changes are closely connected to capitalist modernity and its logic of domination of people and nature in a continuous drive for expansion and growth. Our all-encompassing consumption of the planet takes the form of a massive devastation of the diversity of life-sustaining systems with irredeemable consequences.

The extinction of life does not only concern biodiversity. Human and non-human forms of life and languages, cultures, communities and world views are also being eliminated.

What does this destructive development tell us about Western modernity and its narrative of human exceptionalism? How can we understand Earth’s assemblages of life, their interdependency and our connections to them?

Forms of Entanglement is an attempt to look at these conditions as the ecocide-genocide-epistemicide knot. An entangled process where the violation of nature, people and ways of understanding the world fold into and condition each other.

The exhibition thematises the implications of Eurocentric knowledge hierarchies and multi-species interdependency. These are big perspectives for a small exhibition, which should be understood as tentative notes, an attempt at addressing some of the questions the acute conditions of the planet urge us to raise, if we want to avoid the 6th mass extinction being our final accomplishment.

The participating artists are Demian DinéYazhi’, Mia Edelgart, Anna Ling and Agnes Nanogak Goose.

The exhibition is curated by Katarina Stenbeck and is part of the research project In Search of the Lost Future, which explores the implications of the Anthropocene. It is presented within the frame of Charlottenborg Art Research programme, disseminating the practice based research activities of the Schools of Visual Art and is supported by the Augustinus Foundation, Novo Nordisk Foundation and the Opel Family Foundation.

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