Miranda Smitheram, Macro/Micro_Whakapapa (2019)
Life Forms: Through the Language of Emotion WORDS BY Hannah Foley IMAGES BY Gabrielle Eve
Social anthropologist Tim Ingold suggests that ‘to human is a verb’ — a laying down of lifelines, in an entangled meshwork of ever-becoming otherness. In conceiving this, I imagine humanity as a whole, hurtling at speed, without pause to consider the infinite encounters or the impact of our collisions. Experimenta Life Forms offers its audience a chance to slow down. A point of entanglement at which to pause, and to reflect. To question our own definitions of what constitutes life, as well as the implications of such understandings.
Exhibiting artist and researcher Oron Catts speaks of the ‘acute poverty of language’ in describing what life is. This exhibition, for all its technological intricacies, suggests an alternative language; one that is not spoken but felt. Entering the gallery through blackened glass doors, there is a sense of being engulfed by Daniel Boyd’s video installation, History is Made at Night (p. 11). A mass of colourful dots shimmer and shift as stars in the sky, forming and reforming into unknown constellations. The impression is of
EARTH ISSUE
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