#curatorialstatement

[gwynethgracelee]

Week Twelve - Curatorial Statement

For our last class, we were to make a curatorial statement that outlines this final assessment, explaining any concepts and themes we have used and why this format was chosen.

I had multiple ideas that I originally wanted to do, however I did ended up settling on GIFs as I wanted to expand my skills with motion and make quick moving images that were attention grabbing.

In this gif, there is a bright orange background, and 5 pieces of black text. The colour orange used represents this change and evolution of ideas. Each time one word hits the side of the frame, it changes to another word, resembling ideas bouncing off the walls. Each piece of text represents a thought I had for the format of this publication: “weekly diary”, “photobook”, “letters”, “website”, and finally “gif”. When the “gif” text appears, the colours on screen invert to highlight me settling on this format.

[reeleyegasmic]

#christiandior #curatorialstatement #rom https://www.rom.on.ca/en/dior The exhibit was supposed to end today, bit due to popular demand it has been extended! (at Royal Ontario Museum)

[planetaryawarenessproject]

Curatorial statement

“The Earth is a planet of about 4.54 billion years defined by its geological formations and a density, biosphere, hydrosphere and an atmosphere that sustains all life. It is more than a world for humans, instead defined by its life-sustaining conditions and its planetary relations.”

As the effects of the industrialization within a capitalist market system are becoming increasingly visible, their negative impact on our environment has become undeniable. Since our environments have become more and more urbanized environments with an increasing reliance on technology, we no longer understand or experience nature in the same way. We have become alienated and fail to realistically include other species in our visionaries of the future. The Anthropocene has been used to highlight this acceleration and extent of detrimental human impact on our living planet. However, our current unconscious dependence upon globalist, anthropocentric perspectives limits us in our ability to fully comprehend the critical turning point that our living planet is experiencing. It is time that we come to realize that facing globalization issues is a project beyond the global. It requires an awareness of the planetary.

The ‘planetarity’ was coined by postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as an ethical alternative to globalization. It was introduced as an answer to the market-driven forces of capitalism. Its aim has been to prop a planetary vision of the world which would allow for multiple perspectives and for including all species involved in our habitat. Indeed, the living planet does provide tools for a concrete and ecological framework through which to view the world. As Maja and Reuben Fowkes describe, “to speak of the planetary automatically includes non-Western cultures and the non-human, but also the materiality of the biosphere, from the atmosphere and oceans to the planetary crust, life forms and phenomena that are unreflectively omitted from the global.”

We will invite our audience to undertake this cognitive shift with us; to spatially move beyond the global, and to collectively raise our planetary awareness. We encourage you to visualize alternative frameworks that are more nuanced and acknowledges the ecosystem of the living planet; to confront yourself with the asymmetries of wealth and unequal ecological exchange. We invite you to imagine other-than-human perspectives through which to both consider and challenge anthropocentrism.

We propose the Planet-wary as the post-global human being you will become, once you step into our exhibition space. The Planet-wary is someone who takes the planetary serious both in considering and challenging the Anthropocene. It is someone who allows for exploration and investigation into the interrelationships between planetary imaginaries, political frameworks, artistic agency and environmentalism. The Planet-wary makes space in their minds to abstract from the here and now, and to imagine the there and then. The Planet-wary is not an ideologist, nor does he imposes moral conduct. The Planet-wary is merely aware of what is there. It is a realization; a stance that we can take along while doing politics or ethics. It is someone who is able to take on an over-, under-, outer-, and inner view of the living planet that we share.

Becoming Planet-wary is not a solo undertaking. In order to fully develop yourself into a Planet-wary, you need to imagine moving through time and space. That is where the artist comes in; to take you by the hand through this adventurous journey into evolution, outer-space and beyond. The artist can stimulate you in imagining the past and the future, the denied and the forgotten, the possible and the dreamed of. The artist in our exhibition is someone who’s artistic inquiry has been to abandon human centric visions and to engage with the planetary.

Katie Paterson’s “Earth, Moon, Earth” explores the derangement of time and space experienced when contemplating the planetary. By reflecting notes from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata from the Moon to the Earth and playing them on an automated piano, the artwork explores the relationship of the Earth and the Moon through a symbiotic rather than exploitative viewpoint, encouraging a cognitive shift in our basic planetary understanding. Michael Pinsky’s work deals with environmentalism by calling attention to the human-built world and positioning it as vulnerable landscapes as much as natural ecoscapes. “Plunge” encircles famous London monuments with an illuminated blue line to show the predicted sea level in the year 3012, suggesting that the viewer can imagine placing themselves below the water. “Waterlicht”, by Daan Roosegaarde, provides a sense of being submerged under sea-level once again, this time were it not for human interference. In multiple ways, these pieces create a collectively shared experience both of becoming aware and wary of our positions on this living planet.

Through the displacement of traditional temporal and spatial understandings, alienation of objects, or the replacing of artifacts in an unprecedented space, the artist will leave you with the capability to perceive reality through an alternative lens; the Planet-wary lens. Be welcome to raise with us your awareness of the planetary and to move towards a (r)evolution into a post-global age.