Installation view of “Memory of Nature,” by Indonesian performance artist Arahmaiani. His “Flag Project” (2006-ongoing) hangs on the wall behind it. (collection of the artist / photo by E.G. Schempf)
A traveling, participatory exhibition at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art fosters a mental and spiritual reorientation of the individual’s relationship with the world
“Actions for the Earth: Art, Care & Ecology,” a new traveling exhibition at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, foregrounds artists whose work employs spiritual, religious or ancestral practices to navigate various contemporary challenges, such as modern technology, ecological crises and the legacies of Western imperialism.
“Art,” “Care” and “Action” are certainly at the forefront of all the exhibition’s pieces, as we witness artists — whether directly, in video works, or indirectly, through the artifacts they create — investigate how we can better care for ourselves in light of these challenges. The pieces all seek a mental and spiritual reorientation of the individual’s relationship with the world. Their presence in the Kansas City area offers an outward looking opportunity to a city that is rapidly becoming “global.”
Mounted on the wall at the exhibition’s entrance, the show’s title is set in a font whose visual style seemingly references both pixelation and non-European textile patterns. This combination of the digital with non-Western traditions, plus a welcoming legibility, characterizes the general approach of “Actions for the Earth,” which is curated by the Western Australia-based curator Sharmila Woods and produced by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York.
Independent Curators International is a nonprofit arts organization that “believe(s) that curators create more than exhibitions — they are arts community leaders and organizers.” This exhibit certainly goes beyond the dispassionate display of art. Visitors can participate in many of its actions and objects, such as leaving a note in Zarina Muhammad’s intricate and intimate “Calendrical Systems for the Afterlife.” There is a table with zine-making materials for “The Pocket Guide to Lichen,” as well as a community embroidery project, children’s books and free field guides. Emphasis on engagement extends to the exhibition’s programming, such as an “Introduction to Birding” and a “Foraged Dyes” workshop — all led by local experts and artists. Through all these facets, the exhibition invites us to join its global ecology of artists in their actions for the Earth.
Engaging the Natural World
The first piece we encounter, “Memory of Nature,” by the Indonesian performance artist Arahmaiani, is a good introduction to the exhibition’s overall ethos. It is a wooden garden bed with seeds planted in the shape of a mandala — a cosmological diagram typically associated with Buddhism and Hinduism. Each time I visit, the seeds have grown a little more, their ranginess making the pattern that much more unruly. These sprouts are thus both diagrammatic and irrefutably alive. Enjoying this flash of life in the gallery, I also think about humanity’s species-shaping artifice — how we turn other beings into diagrams of worlds. I think of how a culture’s cosmology inflects its relations with non-human beings.
Many pieces in “Actions for the Earth” create situations that force new relations with the environment, such as how Anna Mendieta placed her own body in her 1970s land art works, documented in photographs on display. Other past works like Yoko Ono’s 1961 “Painting for the Wind” (a set of instructions for using a bag to scatter seeds), and Ackroyd & Harvey’s 2007 seed germination project “Beuys’ Acorns,” envision an ecological art based around mobilizing mass action — particularly, in these cases, involving seeds. The ecological artist plants the conceptual seed, as it were, for actual seeding on a larger scale.
Visitors can listen to Pauline Oliveros’ 1989 album, “Deep Listening,” recorded in a massively reverberating underground cistern. For Oliveros, “deep listening” meant actively responding to the sounds in one’s environment, yet one of the paradoxes of this recording is that one must passively take it in. All the same, it’s beautiful to listen to while looking at Katie West’s “Clearing,” a long swath of suspended silk dyed a gentle mottling of browns, tans and faded golds from various site-specific plants in Australia, now present in the gallery through the magic of the planetary art world. The fabric sways gently as a breeze from the Nerman’s central air conditioning passes through it. How could one engage in deep listening with an AC system? Achieve collaborative resonance — or deep, antagonistic dissonance — with a planetary economy?
Other pieces document, exemplify and modify traditional activities related to the natural world. Patrina Munuŋgurr’s video “Gurrku Dhälkuma” depicts the preparation of gapan, a white ochre clay “symbolic of many things in the lexicon of the poetic Yolŋu universe, from seafoam . . . to clouds.” The video captures a sacred state in which the clay is both itself and a symbol of its own world: an ecological, more-than-human means of more-than-representation.
Some projects are more speculative. For instance, the three-channel video “As Grand As What,” by the duo Hylozoic Desires, uses Tibetan medicine and Buddhist cosmology to invent new rituals. These are actions not only for the Earth, but with the Earth, in the Earth, and through the Earth, as the artists employ (and immerse their bodies in) water, leaves, fronds, stones and dirt: a psycho-spiritual ecology based on ritual, music, language and image.
Addressing the Legacies of Colonialism
The environmental and personal legacies of Western colonialism also play a large role in the exhibit. In the moving video “IRMANDADE: The Shape of Water in Pindorama,” South Africa-based artist Lhola Amira travels to Bahia, Brazil, tracking and healing the psychic wounds of the transatlantic slave trade in people’s lives and in the water itself. At the end, Amira sits with red wine and a cigar: two agricultural commodities of colonialism and the slave trade, but originally Indigenous products of South Africa and South America. Talismans of the land’s past and future. Eric-Paul Riege’s “blanket 4 epr [2] draped upon Shádi’ááh to keep him warm” is a soft, hanging sculpture of a sheep. It responds, in part, to the systematic slaughter of sheep used as a genocidal weapon by the U.S. government against the Diné in the 19th century. I think of this sheep as a kind of artificial life form — not an AI or robotic body, but a deep form of life-giving, of healing, a confluence of historical, material and cultural factors. Its inscrutable face exudes a certain charisma; it beckons us to a non-human world that can see beyond colonialism.
These artists all work from cultural traditions that have distinct cosmologies and mythologies of the land, their own Earths. To my mind, “Actions for the Earth” actually dissolves the received notion of “planet earth” into something less certain — I start picturing the planet as a geometry of many different spiritual topologies pasted together. How do we move between these varying traditions? I wonder if “ecology” — a relatively new discipline that responds to longstanding assumptions in Western thought about the natural world — really is what non-Western cosmologies mean when they represent the relationships between humans, the earth and other beings. How can we think of ecology as part of a larger space that also contains non-Western cosmologies, with their own conceptions of inter-species relations?
This quandary is addressed by the collective lololol and the artist Tabitha Rezaire. Lololol’s ongoing project “FUTURE TAO: Inner Scripture” deconstructs human wellness to blur the lines between humans, nature and technology — connecting ecology to ancient Chinese thought and contemporary digital culture. Their prints suggest both traditional hanging scrolls and the modern activity of scrolling on a phone. Digital provocations include: “How to Be a Plant,” “Moon Tides 1” (sounds recorded from both human and plant bodies), and “3C Xing Yi Quan” (an “open source new style of martial arts” based on computer-desk posture).” In the next room over, Tabitha Rezaire’s video “Premium Connect” is perhaps the most speculative, contemporary-feeling, and conceptually dense piece in the exhibition, weaving reflections on time, colonialism, ancestral knowledge, physics, computation, well-being and healing — among other subjects — through layered video and computer-generated graphics. Both ironic and deadly serious, embracing a digital realm it also distrusts, the video proposes its own brand of spiritual healing as an amalgam of these varied influences.
“Actions for the Earth” has also been exhibited in Texas and Illinois, integrating the middle of the country into its global — or more than global — approach. Anyone who visits the show leaves with a head full of new worlds, strategies for care and action, and deep questions about cosmologies, ecologies and the roles non-human beings have to play in human art.
“Actions for the Earth: Art, Care & Ecology” continues at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art at Johnson County Community College, 12345 College Blvd., Overland Park, through Dec. 8. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Friday and Saturday; 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. For more information, 913.469.3000 or www.nermanmuseum.org.
