A Natural History of Ruins
A Natural History of Ruins is a group exhibition that explores different forms of resistance to the ways in which the hegemonic modern colonial imagery has captured our imagination. Drawing from diverse artistic practices, this exhibition seeks to offer opportunities to think about healing in what author Anna Tsing calls a 鈥榩recarious survival鈥�. It also attempts to address the implications of representation outside of language in order to explore other-than-human forms of intelligence.
At the core of the exhibition, there is a critique of the modern divide between nature and culture and its ontological implications. Through a series of historical processes, some humans separated themselves from nature and therefore fabricated it as a category. Colonial regimes spread this notion through education and exploitation, normalizing nature as a 鈥榬esource鈥� at humans鈥� disposal. It is largely through the knowledge and ecological practices of Indigenous peoples that these functioning colonial categories can be productively challenged.
The transformation of 鈥榥atural history鈥� museums into 鈥榥atural science鈥� ones seem to suggest a rhetorical shift 鈥榟istory鈥� as a narrative exercise to 鈥榮cience鈥� as disinterested, objective observation that achieves the full separation of subjects (humans) from objects (non-humans, other-than-humans, but also humans subjected to scientific research). In the process, history is politically neutralised. By opening up dominant definitions of technology to include some that are not inherently attached to the Western notion of progress, art can lead towards a world of multiplicities where the centrality of the reality created by colonisation can be finally unveiled as a brutal, yet efficacious construction bound towards an ill-fated image of progress. In this way, the ruins produced in the present can be partially considered as the projection of a modernist unconscious.
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A Natural History of Ruins is a group exhibition that explores different forms of resistance to the ways in which the hegemonic modern colonial imagery has captured our imagination. Drawing from diverse artistic practices, this exhibition seeks to offer opportunities to think about healing in what author Anna Tsing calls a 鈥榩recarious survival鈥�. It also attempts to address the implications of representation outside of language in order to explore other-than-human forms of intelligence.
At the core of the exhibition, there is a critique of the modern divide between nature and culture and its ontological implications. Through a series of historical processes, some humans separated themselves from nature and therefore fabricated it as a category. Colonial regimes spread this notion through education and exploitation, normalizing nature as a 鈥榬esource鈥� at humans鈥� disposal. It is largely through the knowledge and ecological practices of Indigenous peoples that these functioning colonial categories can be productively challenged.
The transformation of 鈥榥atural history鈥� museums into 鈥榥atural science鈥� ones seem to suggest a rhetorical shift 鈥榟istory鈥� as a narrative exercise to 鈥榮cience鈥� as disinterested, objective observation that achieves the full separation of subjects (humans) from objects (non-humans, other-than-humans, but also humans subjected to scientific research). In the process, history is politically neutralised. By opening up dominant definitions of technology to include some that are not inherently attached to the Western notion of progress, art can lead towards a world of multiplicities where the centrality of the reality created by colonisation can be finally unveiled as a brutal, yet efficacious construction bound towards an ill-fated image of progress. In this way, the ruins produced in the present can be partially considered as the projection of a modernist unconscious.
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Piv么 opens its 2021 exhibitions program* with the group-show 鈥婣 Natural History of Ruins鈥�, starting on February 20.
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