The pen moves across the earth: it no longer knows what will happen, and the hand that holds it has disappeared

Featuring A Reading of Art in the Anthropocene, an artist project by Etienne Turpin in collaboration with Anna-Sophie Springer, Tomás Saraceno, Sasha Engelman, Jol Thoms, and the students of the Institut für Architekturbezogene Kunst (Braunschweig, Germany), an exhibition text by Christine Shaw, project statements, artist biographies, and full colour illustrations throughout.

 

This micropublication was produced on the occasion of the exhibition, The pen moves across the earth.., September 16 - November 29, 2015.

Ismaïl Bahri, Pascal Grandmaison, Sarah Anne Johnson, Tim Knowles, Jennifer Rose Sciarrino, Kara Uzelman & Robert Wysocki

Curated by Christine Shaw

 

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The pen moves across the earth: it no longer knows what will happen, and the hand that holds it has disappeared. (1)

The Earth is mute but she makes noise, and to attune ourselves to these atmospheric qualities means to sense out and give name to the movements of particles, cells, sand, aerosols, molecules, dust, ash, and pollen; the same with fluids, drops, currents, streams, drift, turbulence, evaporation, volatilization, thermodynamics, breath, and odour; likewise even for fire, flames, plasma, light, fields, forces, beams, energy, gravity, reflection, inference, magnetism, and transmissions. These particulars act and interact. Their morphological qualities—the forms they take on as they undergo relational movements of transference—settle into temporary states, only to resituate themselves.

 

ENDNOTE

1. Paul Auster, “White Nights,” in Disappearances, Selected Poems (New York: Overlook Press, 1988), 88.

Biographies

Ismaïl Bahri was born in Tunis, Tunisia. He lives and works between Pairs and Tunis, where he studied art. His work incorporates many cultural and aesthetic references, developing visual experiments that are both sensitive and exacting. The results of these experiments take the varying forms of drawings, videos, photographs, installations, and hybrids of these forms. His work has been presented at Les églises de Chelles, the Collège des Bernardins (Paris), the Cinémathèque of Tangiers, the Staatliche Kunsthalle (Karlsruhe), Kunst Im Tunnel (Düsseldorf), La Centrale électrique (Brussels), the British Film Institute (London), Fondazione Mertz (Turin), and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon), among others. Ismaïl Bahri has participated in international exhibitions such as the Biennale de Sharjah, Rencontres de Bamako and Fotographia Europea. In France, his works were recently included in the exhibitions Mandrake a disparu at Espace Khiasma and L’arbre de vie at Collège des Bernardins. He has participated in video festivals such as Busan International Video art (South Korea), Cinemed Festival International Méditerranéen (France), Panorama des cinémas du Maghreb (France), and Videoformes (Clermont-Ferrand).

Pascal Grandmaison lives and works in Montreal. While he is best known for his work in photography and film and video, his oeuvre also includes sculpture and installation. Pascal Grandmaison is interested in the ways images influence our perception and understanding of infinity. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain (Luxembourg), the Art Gallery of Hamilton (Ontario), Prefix Photo (Toronto), Galerie Éponyme (Bordeaux) and Galerie René Blouin (Montreal). He has also participated in group exhibitions, most notably at La Compagnie, lieu de creation (Marseilles), the Art Gallery of Hamilton (Ontario), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (Montréal), Centre culturel canadien (Paris). His videos have been presented internationally, more recently at Haus der Kulturen des Welt (Berlin), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Edinburgh Art Festival (Edinburgh), Le Fresnoy (Tourcoing), and Centre Pompidou (Paris). He is represented by Galerie René Blouin (Montréal) and by Eponyme Galerie (Bordeaux). 

Winnipeg-based artist Sarah Anne Johnson was trained as a photographer but uses a variety of media including painting, sculpture, and performance. She received a BFA from the University of Manitoba and completed an MFA at the Yale School of Art. Earlier this year Johnson debuted her first mid-career retrospective, Sarah Anne Johnson: Wonderland, 2002-2014, at The Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh and unveiled a 144 foot photographic mural at the Westin Harbour Castle Conference Centre commissioned by Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival. She has been collected by several significant institutions including The Guggenheim Museum, The National Gallery of Canada, New York Library, and The Phillips Collection. She has participated in group exhibitions at The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, The Canadian Biennial at the National Gallery of Canada, The Guggenheim Museum, The National Gallery of Victoria, and La Fondation Cartier in Paris. In 2008 Johnson was the recipient of the inaugural Aimia Prize for Contemporary Photography and is a finalist for the 2015 Sobey Art Award. She is represented by Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto and Julie Saul Gallery in New York.

Tim Knowles is an artist based in London, UK. His creative practice incorporates chance, process, and performance into mark making systems. Like a signature, each system reveals the characteristics of an otherwise unnoticed physical experience. Knowles has exhibited widely, including at MassART (Boston), Art Stations (Poznan), Generali Foundation (Vienna), Plymouth Arts Centre, Hayward Gallery (London), and Gallery Skuc (Ljubljana). His work has been featured in Art in America, Artforum, Cabinet Magazine, The Independent, The Guardian and Art and Ecology Now, published by Thames and Hudson. He holds awards and residencies from South West Arts, the British Council in Rome, the Henry Moore Foundation, and the Institute of Biological, Environmental, and Rural Studies in Aberystwyth, Wales. Knowles studied sculpture at the Bath College of Higher Education and has taught at numerous institutions throughout the UK and the USA including Stanford University, MIT, and Slade School of the Art. Knowles will be featured in Scotiabank Nuit Blanche on October 3, 2015 as part of the exhibition The Work of Wind, curated by Christine Shaw.

Jennifer Rose Sciarrino is a Toronto-based artist working in photography, sculpture, and installation. Her work actively examines the continually evolving line between real and 3D rendered surfaces in visualization and contemporary object making. Sciarrino has exhibited work nationally in a number of group and solo exhibitions including Patterned Recognition, a solo exhibition at Daniel Faria Gallery (Toronto 2014), NADA New York (with Daniel Faria Gallery, 2014), Who's Afraid of Purple, Orange and Green at Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina, 2014), From Nature at Equinox Gallery (Vancouver, 2013), x,y,z at Daniel Faria Gallery (Toronto, 2012), trans/FORM at The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto, 2012) and To What Does This Sweet Cold Earth Belong? at The Power Plant (Toronto, 2011). In 2013 Sciarrino was a recipient of the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts “Artist Prize”.

Kara Uzelman‘s sculptural works are typified by a deep engagement with found objects and material processes in which collections of discarded objects, the newly obsolete, and remnant materials of everyday life are collaged with research salvaged from our collective dustbin. Since graduating with a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2004, Uzelman’s work has been exhibited internationally in DIY exhibitions, artist run centers, museums, commercial galleries, and art fairs.  Recent exhibitions include Concerning Certain Events at the Mendel Art Gallery (Saskatoon, 2015), Gleaners at the Art Gallery of Nanaimo (2015), The Geometry of Knowing at Audain Gallery (Vancouver, 2015), and From What Remains at the Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina, 2014). She has received numerous awards, and her work has been written about in major art publications in both Canada and Europe including C Magazine, Frieze, and Artforum.  She has attended residencies at The Klondike Institute of Art (Dawson City, Canada), Triangle (Marseille, France), Mains d'Oeuvres (Paris, France), Les Ateliers des Arques (Les Arques, France).  Uzelman currently lives and works in the rural farming community of Nokomis, Saskatchewan and her work is represented by Sommer & Kohl (Berlin).

Robert Wysocki is an artist whose work is an autobiographical examination stemming from his lifelong fascination with the landscape. Wysocki grew up on a farm in Northern California, where his understanding and love of the natural landscape took shape and is now manifest in his self-defined and self-created landscapes. His land art, influenced by the tradition of the German Romantic landscape painters of the 18th century, contemplates natural landform and the sublime. With the use of transcendent, dangerous, and spectacular materials such as sand dunes and lava, Wysocki conveys the power and force of nature as well as the inherent beauty and wonder of earth processes. A graduate of UC Berkeley, Wysocki received his MFA in sculpture from Yale University and is a professor of sculpture at Syracuse University. He lives and works in Upstate New York with his wife and two sons. Wysocki’s work will be featured in Scotiabank Nuit Blanche on October 3, 2015 as part of the exhibition The Work of Wind, curated by Christine Shaw.

 

Etienne Turpin is a philosopher studying, designing, curating, and writing about complex urban systems, political economies of data and infrastructure, visual culture and aesthetics, and Southeast Asian colonial-scientific history, and principal director of anexact office, a design research practice based in Jakarta, Indonesia. Etienne is Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the SMART Infrastructure Facility, Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences, University of Wollongong, Australia. He is the editor of Architecture of the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy (Open Humanities Press, 2013), Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (Open Humanities Press, 2015), and co-editor, with Anna-Sophie Springer, of the six-part intercalations: paginated exhibition series co-published by K. and the HKW.

Credits

A Reading of Art in the Anthropocene, an artist project by Etienne Turpin in collaboration with Anna-Sophie Springer, Tomás Saraceno, Sasha Engelman, Jol Thoms, and the students of the Institut für Architekturbezogene Kunst (Braunschweig, Germany)

Exhibition text: Christine Shaw

Image credit: Robert Wysocki, Post Metal (detail), 2008, 24' x 40' x 4.5'. 100,000lbs of sand from the Ancient Florida Dune (Lake Wells, Florida), forty-four 22” industrial floor fans, 2000w scoop light. Installation photo of The Contemporary Art Museum at the University of South Florida & Flight 19 at the Tampa Amtrak Station, Tampa, Florida. Photo credit: Peter Foy.

Design: Matthew Hoffman

Printing: Colour Code Printing

How To Order

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Acknowledgments

Generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, with additional support from the Department of Visual Studies (UTM), Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, TIFF Bell Lightbox and the Sheridan Faculty of Animation, Arts and Design.



Related Projects

The pen moves across the earth: it no longer knows what will happen, and the hand that holds it has disappeared
September 16 - November 29, 2015
Ismaïl Bahri, Pascal Grandmaison, Sarah Anne Johnson, Tim Knowles, Jennifer Rose Sciarrino, Kara Uzelman & Robert Wysocki
Curated by Christine Shaw