ART PREVIEW:Life Itself
Ever since the days of Aristotle, life itself has remained a mystery, in spite of countless attempts by scientists and philosophers to come up with a definition. Despite contemporary advanced theories about complex systems and the vertiginous potential of synthetic biology, we are still unable to determine what constitutes life.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Moderna Museet Archive
An attempt to address the question by means of an art exhibition therefore seems justified, if only to demonstrate ways of dealing with our incapability to find a satisfactory answer. What does life consist of? This question is at the heart of Moderna Museet’s group exhibition “Life Itself”. Despite countless attempts of scientists and philosophers, no one seems to have come up with a satisfactory definition, not even with the aid of today’s advanced theories on complex systems. On the contrary, the astounding potential of synthetic biology has, if anything, added to the sense of uncertainty. The exhibition covers a period from the early 20th Century, when artists developed a dialogue with the new theories on evolution, over a number of modernists, to today’s artists whose works are created in a technologically manipulated reality. In the “GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction”, Mark Leckey gives voice to a smart fridge, scrutinizing how the high-tech objects around us are ever more distinctly modelled on ourselves. A monolithic Samsung refrigerator appears in the middle of a large green screen background, as it is used in film productions. The green screen allows various motifs to be set into the scene during post-production. A video plays visualizations of the refrigerator’s possible thoughts and needs. It presents the viewer with images of lush green vegetables and the kitchen in which it might stand. It shows graphic simulations of its internal circuits of compressors and cooling coils, which turn the liquid into vapor and vapor into gas, to demonstrate how it operates. Many of the works in the exhibition are distinguished by a recurrent desire to delve more deeply into everything that surrounds us, revealing how that which is alive is perhaps not fully so and vice versa. This prompts us to consider whether it is meaningful to make such distinctions in the first place. No doubt similar motivations can be found in some of today’s most speculative theoretical approaches, not least in those new forms of materialism that attempt to rid our thinking of the obsession with the historically overemphasized relationship between a perceiving subject and a known object. Instead, these theorists claim, we should explore other equally productive relationships between human and non-human agents – be they technical or biological. The artists featured in the exhibition are: Giovanni Anselmo, Olga Balema, Hicham Berrada, Joseph Beuys, Karl Blossfeldt, Constantin Brancusi, Victor Brauner, Nina Canell, Lygia Clark, Trisha Donnelly, Monica Englund, Valia Fetisov, Dirk Fleischmann, Katharina Fritsch, Ernst Haeckel, Barbara Hauser, Tamara Henderson, Eva Hesse, Damien Hirst, Tehching Hsieh, Pierre Huyghe, Carsten Höller/Rosemarie Trockel, On Kawara, Josh Kline, Hilma af Klint, Edward Krasinski, Mark Leckey, Helen Marten, Henri Michaux, Barnett Newman, Otobong Nkanga, Katja Novitskova, Philippe Parreno, Giuseppe Penone, Leo Reis, Ulf Rollof, Rachel Rose, Anri Sala, Sebastian Stöhrer, Sturtevant, Paul Thek, Rosemarie Trockel, Rosemarie Trockel/Günter Weseler, and Christine Ödlund.
Info: Curators: Daniel Birnbaum, Carsten Höller & Jo Widoff, Moderna Museet, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Duration: 20/2-8/5/16, Days & Hours: Tue & Fri 10:00-20:00, Wed-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.modernamuseet.se
