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News exhibitions

From Labs and Studios to Exhibition venues in 2022  

by: Alexia Mangelinckx
31.01.2022

 

 

This Spring ‘22, after completing 13 Art&Science residencies over a course of 17 months and accros 18 countries, STUDIOTOPIA will host a Joint Travelling Exhibition in partnering venues across Europe to present the results, developed concepts, research material, or artworks generated during these residencies. We invite you from 4 February till 3 April in Gdansk (Poland) at the Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art for the first iteration. The second iteration will be hosted at Bozar, The Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels (Belgium) from 6 May to 19 Jun.’22. And the Cluj Cultural Centre in Cluj (Romania) will close the travelling exhibition from July 1st to August 1st.

 

Between 2020 and 2022, the STUDIOTOPIA Art&Science residency programme encouraged scientists to exchange ideas, knowledge, and methodologies with international artists on environmental and societal challenges. The sustainable development goals set by the United Nations are at the very core of this programme.  Some of the themes the artists and scientists are collaborating on are: pollution of water and mountains by microplastics, a more sustainable food system,  biomedicine and skin color, plants as living organisms, cancer and poetry, hybrid identities, the heartbeat of Iceland’s glaciers, extreme forms of light and computer music.

 

Curators Maja & Reuben Fowkes about the exhibition: 'The boundaries between the sciences and the arts have been profoundly destabilized by the Anthropocene as runaway ecological breakdown corrodes the epistemic structures of carbon modernity. This exhibition explores the potential of art practices to reshape the governing paradigm of scientific understanding by disrupting its atomized logic and pushing research methodologies to the boundaries of the possible. It brings together artworks that emerge from the crucible of a collaborative process in which laboratories, technologies and expertise have opened up to the catalyst of artistic invention. Liberating enquiry from the constraints of Holocene epistemologies, such settings create the conditions for unconventional responses to planetary challenges to be articulated. With the reversal of the usual division of roles, “science for art’s sake” could be the alternative maxim of art-science collaborations in which art poses the questions and science illuminates a pathway to outcomes. The diversity of approaches in the exhibition reflects the eclectic palette of scientific expertise engaged in the Studiotopia project, from oncology to marine biology, chemistry to ecological psychology, seismology to more-than-human anthropology, as well as palaeontology, photonics, data science and plant biology. In light of the multiple challenges of the Anthropocene, from the disaster of climate change, species extinction and the rolling pandemic to the accelerating hybridization of natural and synthetic worlds, Colliding Epistemes amplifies the call for epistemic diversity, resists a priori demands for utility and advocates for socially just and ecologically conscious scientific practices. When the epistemes of art and science collide, disciplinary boundaries dissolve, the hierarchies of Western thought are radically subverted, and hybrid forms of untamed knowledge of the world emerge.'

The STUDIOTOPIA Joint travelling exhibition is conceived as a tripartite constellation of cellular clusters presenting collaborations that materialize the shifting sands of artistic and scientific concern in the Anthropocene. In the first cluster on Speculative Ecologies artists draw on alternative epistemes to challenge the spatial order and temporalities of the Anthropocene. Invoking folk wisdom to foretell the future from fish intestines, hypothesizing the pre-human evolution of plastics and tuning in to the frequencies of a primeval bog are all means to reveal the collision of human and natural histories in the new geological epoch. Scientific observation of the effect of light on microscopic particles is another artistic starting point to inquire into the radical interconnectedness of all living and non-living terrestrial entities and the origins of biological life. The second cluster Earthly Sensorium gathers artworks that create the conditions for heightened ecological sensitivity and challenge societal indifference towards fellow species. Contemporary science and vernacular knowledge coalesce in the interdisciplinary study and appreciation of the vegetal world, while empathy with plants is identified as a societal factor in bringing about ecological transition. Alternative epistemologies thrive here on sensorial exchanges between taxonomic orders, with poetry, painting, movement, as well as sound and smell, creating a phenomenological bridge to aberrant cells, geomorphic vibrations and cerebral waves. The third cluster on Hacking Technocracy gathers art practices that subvert the technological panaceas and superficial solutions to systemic problems advocated by corporate and political interests. The ecological shortcuts promised by biotechnology, green capitalism and virtual representations, which leave unjust social structures untouched, are subverted by imagining non-technocratic trajectories, advocating low tech adaptations and animating alternative scenarios.

 

Don’t wait for the exhibitions to discover the artists & scientists and their residency-projects and catch up with them on the Studiotopia Residencies Blog.

Find out more about the curator's view on the Studiotopia Joint Travelling Exhibition on www.translocal.org/collidingguide.

 


Curators

Maja & Reuben Fowkes

Find out more about the curators

 

Participating Artists & Scientists

Sandra Lorenzi (ART) & Jean-Christophe Marine (SCI)
Kuang-Yi Ku (ART) & Jean-Christophe Marine – Sofie Goormachtig (SCI)
Hypercomf (ART) & Markos K. Digenis (SCI)
3137 (ART) & Dr. Audrey-Flore Ngomsik (SCI)
Alexandra Pirici (ART) & Paco Calvo (SCI)
Ciprian Mureşan (ART) & Sanneke Stigter – Sven Dupré (SCI)
Christiaan Zwanikken (ART) & Emmanuel Grimaud – DM Hoyt (SCI)
Dmitry Gelfand – Eveline Domnitch (ART) & Florian Schreck - Guillaume Schweicher (SCI)
Oswaldo Maciá (ART) & Chris Bean – Emilia Leszkowicz (SCI)
Maja Smrekar (ART) & Jonas Jørgensen (SCI)
Kat Austen (ART) & Indre Žliobaitė – Laurence Gill (SCI)
Voldemars Johansons (ART) & Hugo Thienpont – Alexander Kish – Antoine Reserbat-Plantey (SCI)
Siobhán McDonald (ART) & Chris Bean – Teresa Lettieri – Emily Shuckburgh (SCI)

 

Find out more about the Studiotopia teams

 


 

STUDIOTOPIA is a creative journey addressing sustainable development across Europe through the converging views of art and science. In the course of almost two years, with a unique, long-term Art&Science European-wide residency programme, STUDIOTOPIA encouraged renowned and emerging contemporary artists to host a scientist or researcher in the independent and inspiring environment of their studios, reversing the usual approach whereby artists are invited to work at R&D departments of universities or companies. During their residencies, both the artists and the scientists were put on the same level. More than 13 artists and 25 scientists have as such teamed up for a 17 months-long residency programme across 18 countries.

 

 

 

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