Alexandra
Navratil, Detail of ‘Modern Magic’ (2013), courtesy the artist
and Dan Gunn, Berlin
4.543
billion. The matter of matter’ is an exhibition that addresses
works of art, collections and cultural histories in relation to
ecological processes and a geological scale of time. It presents a
continuum of materials and temporal landscapes – films, works on
paper, photographs, sculptures, documents, and other meaningful
things – and springs from the CAPC
building’s former life
as a warehouse for colonial commodities whose limestone walls were
once deep in the ground and whose wooden beams were once part of a
forest.
A
central proposal of the exhibition is that works of art are part of
geophysical history as much as art history. ‘4.543 billion’
attempts to take into account both a micro-local and a planetary
perspective, and to rethink some of the histories of art as fragments
of broader narratives about the Earth and how our place in it has
been represented. What is at stake when art and museums take on
greater temporal and material awareness? How might they move beyond a
spatial framework of “think globally, act locally”, to “think
historically, act geologically”?
This
exhibition takes a situated view of the past that resists an
undifferentiated narrative in which modernity in general is at fault
for global ecological disarray, or humanity in an invariably abstract
sense must take responsibility. Accordingly, the artists included
instead often address the specific roles and purposeful effects of
individuals, practices, states or corporations in an account of how
mineral agents and organic processes have intertwined with and
underpinned culture. Several of the more documentary projects on
display trace the relationships between Modern art, the museum, and
wealth created through extractive industry, combining approaches
framed by Earth sciences with colonial history, sociology and
political reportage. Yet other works take a more atmospheric, filmic,
sculptural or graphic approach to extraction, economy, energy and
global exchange, whether orbiting around sunlight, forests, synthetic
materials derived from fossil fuels, or the services and substances
entailed in buildings that display art
With
the participation of: A.J. Aalders, Lara Almarcegui, Maria Thereza
Alves, Félix Arnaudin, Amy Balkin, Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck in
collaboration with Media Farzin, Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher,
Étienne Denisse, Hubert Duprat, Giulio Ferrario, Ângela Ferreira,
Anne Garde, Ambroise-Louis Garneray, Terence Gower, Rodney Graham,
Ilana Halperin (also at the Université de Bordeaux’s zoology
department), Marianne Heier, Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller,
Lucas Ihlein and Louise Kate Anderson, Jannis Kounellis, Martín
Llavaneras, Erlea Maneros Zabala, Nicholas Mangan, Fiona Marron,
Alexandra Navratil, Xavier Ribas, Alfred Roll, Amie Siegel, Lucy
Skaer, Alfred Smith, Rayyane Tabet, Pierre Théron, Pep Vidal,
Alexander Whalley Light, Stuart Whipps (also at the Musée des
Beaux-Arts) as well as documents and objects lent by the archives of
the CAPC, the Archives Bordeaux Métropole, the Archives
départementales de la Gironde, and the geology collection of the UFR
Sciences de la Terre et de la Mer, Université de Bordeaux.
Curated
by Latitudes
CAPC
musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux
29
June 2017–7 January 2018
