Peril

Betty Böhm, Stefanie Loveday, Oliver Walker & Nat Tafelmacher-Magnat

6.10.2023 – 15.10.2023

Curated by Nat Tafelmacher-Magnat

Headline:

The climate crisis is here. Artists have not gone extinct.

Humanity needs to act collectively and urgently. Everyone of us would need to individually accept the necessary changes to survive as a group: the collective must drastically reduce forever its fossil way of life. Fridays for Future put it on a banner: There can't be infinite growth on a finite planet. However the worldwide body politic and its many voters refuse this idea. We hang on to the idea of green growth, but it is not a thing. Even green growth puts a break on the transformation that is necessary.

Parts of the collective know the solutions: keep fossil fuels in the ground. Rethink our extractive, materialist way of life. Rehabilitate nature: land and marine forests absorb carbon the best of all. Nature knows how to generate equilibrium. Nature as our friend, our ally, not a subjugated slave to human beings' consumption frenzy.

What does a contemporary human society look like that is not dependent on fossil fuels and a growing extraction of ressources? This demands a revolution in how we imagine our lives and our place in the world. The arts can function as a space to think the changes that humanity experiences, to put words and images to emotions, to offer new perspectives, visions and utopias, even. In an ongoing work of dialogue with other artists in exhibitions, Nat Tafelmacher-Magnat proposes to explore exactly this.

What iconography does contemporary art develop to represent, express and respond to this new human condition, the Anthropocene? What images, narratives and experiences can art offer to contemporary discourse and debates on this subject?

Betty Böhm's Tethys cycle ''The Lament of Tethys'' and ''The Wrath of Tethys'' effectively combines the observation of changing landscapes with elements of mythology to mirror and put in context the emotions that many of us feel in front of the crisis. Stefanie Loveday's work ''To Sink and to Cave'' explores and draws our attention to the fragility that develops in previously more resilient landscapes, at the same time inviting us to re-experience wonder. Nat Tafelmacher-Magnat and Oliver Walker explore our relationship to the material detail of our everyday lives: how changing significance is to be found in the mundane objects that surround us. Tafelmacher-Magnat observes her children interacting with the world. Walker does this with dialogue and performance around the emergence of new technologies, laying bare the process of invention with its ups and downs, failures and exhilarations.

This show proposes to show a couple of entry points into the above questions. One of them shows the dire state of our relationship to Nature. Another invites us to open ourselves up to emotions of anger, grief and wonder. Another explores our relationship to the Material: how we use materials, what they come to mean in our societies. The ongoing goal is for these shows to stretch, train and fire the public imagination.