Featuring project descriptions, an introduction and exhibition text by Christine Shaw, artist biographies, and full colour illustrations throughout.
This micropublication was produced on the occasion of Logics of Sense 2: Implications, October 28-December 7, 2019.
Logics of Sense 2: Implications
Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
Miles Rufelds
YangMing
Curated by Christine Shaw
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Logics of Sense
Although the worlds we inhabit are invariably composed of sensations and sense-makings, it is a peculiar challenge to perceive ourselves sensing. Because our human-centred sensory habits are so difficult to discern, we can often mistake them for natural tendencies. As an attunement to the aesthetics of sensation, the exhibition Logics of Sense—presented in two parts at the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga—examines sense-in-the-making, from the surface of incorporeal events to a multiplicity of decentralized perceptions, and from itinerant geo-methodologies to the various disciplinary frames and frameworks that artistic intelligence retrofits for emergent social and political realities.
Logics of Sense 1: Investigations (September 4-October 19, 2019) includes works from Ursula Biemann, Mikhail Karikis, Susan Schuppli, and Jol Thomson; their respective videos and video essays address the interactions between land and the atmosphere, changing planetary dynamics, terrestrial micro-events, and the inheritance of knowledge. Moving through modes of prediction, observation, expression, perception, and re-configuration, visitors are invited to explore the becoming-sensuous of technoscience in formation.
Logics of Sense 2: Implications (October 28–December 7, 2019) includes works by Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, Barbara Marcel, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Miles Rufelds, and YangMing. Among their videos, sculptures, and screenings, visitors are implicated in both seeing like a state and sharing in ecological complicity through colonial pasts and capitalist futures. As geopolitical backstories unfold to reveal an entropic obsolescence of objects, a storm builds toward the moment of its explosive release.
Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen work across objects, installation, and film to explore processes of production as cultural, personal, and political practices. Their work was recently shown at the Renaissance Society in Chicago; Serpentine Cinema, London; Fotomuseum Winterthur; Para Site Hong Kong; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Vienna; Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; and Congo International Film Festival. It has been collected by the MoMA, New York and M+ Museum in Hong Kong. They work and live in London.
Miles Rufelds is an artist, writer, and researcher based in Toronto. He holds a Master of Visual Studies in Studio Art from the University of Toronto, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Ottawa. Rufelds’ interdisciplinary projects weave images, videos, documents, and objects with experimental narrative structures. His works use artistic platforms as sites to explore stories connecting the tightening holds of corporate or military power to the histories of ecology, science, industry, food, film, and aesthetics. He’s exhibited in solo and group exhibitions, as well as screening programs and lecture series’ nationally and internationally, including recent exhibitions at the Art Museum and Bunker2 in Toronto, SIM Gallery in Reykjavik, Roman Susan in Chicago, and an upcoming solo exhibition at PAVED Arts in Saskatoon.
YangMing’s work often explores “space shaping”—combining images, videos, and bodies which shape an overall scenography in order to reflect on interactive relationships: between people, people and society, people and the world, people and art. Creating projects that function as games and prompt attention to real social and political situations, YangMing nurtures an interest in comprehensive thinking on specific social events. Often, he achieves this through the transformation of tiny things in different media and space and time, believing that the tiny things behind daily events can reveal their nature. Living and working in Beijing for more than ten years, YangMing is now based in HangZhou and Berlin.
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is an artist whose expanded moving image work is entangled with Boalian theater, experimental ethnography, and feminist thought. She tends to work with non-actors, and incorporate improvisation into her process. Her recent work is on the sensorial unconscious of anti-colonial movements, and on everyday poetic work in the Caribbean. Recent solo exhibitions include: Gosila, Der Tank, Basel; Nuevos Materiales, Museo Amparo; Safehouse, Sullivan Galleries, A Universe of Fragile Mirrors, PAMM, Miami; Song Strategy Sign, New Museum; La Cabeza Mató a Todos, TEORética, San José, Costa Rica. México D.F. Her work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions and biennials worldwide. She has received the Herb Alpert Arts Award, she was 2016 USA Ford Fellow, and received a 2015 Creative Capital visual artist grant for a film-in-progress titled Verano de Mujeres.
Cover image credit: Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, Trapped in the Dream of the Other (production still), 2017. Courtesy the artists.
Design: Matthew Hoffman
Printing: Thistle Printing
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The Blackwood Gallery gratefully acknowledges the operating support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the University of Toronto Mississauga.
