BERRIEDALE.- Tomás Saraceno’s contagious curiosity is on full display at Mona in a major new exhibition. Open until July 2023, Oceans of Air is a multi-sensory show, featuring a series of artworks spreading throughout the deepest floor of the museum’s subterranean galleries.

Mona has been fascinated by Saraceno for some time—an Argentinian contemporary artist based in Berlin attuned to the changes modern humans and capitalism have wrought on the world (in what he and others describe as a new era, called 'the Capitalocene'). In this exhibition he presents artworks and community projects, from tiny dust particles to large-scale installations, all informed by various perspectives. Oceans of Air includes a selection of existing works and new commissions created specially for Mona, and is a call for environmental action on the Earth, its atmosphere and beyond.

David Walsh, Mona owner and founder said: ‘Once upon a time artists used to make beautiful things. Now, mostly, they want to change the world. Of the artists I know, Tomás Saraceno is the most likely to change the world. And he makes beautiful things.’

Inspired by knowledge systems that are rooted in their location, ecology, communication between species, the fight for climate justice, and more, Saraceno interweaves many scientific and artistic disciplines in search of shared understanding among the threads and tangles of worlds. With air—invisible yet all around us—as a central theme, this exhibition draws from his interdisciplinary approach, revealing the interconnectedness of art, our environment and contemporary life.

Tomás Saraceno says: ‘We live entangled lives, and as Torricelli, a student of Galileo once said, we are all always ‘living submerged at the bottom of an ocean of air’. The air itself is restless, constantly in motion. The humans of the Capitalocene, caught in the undertow of extractivist ethics and the rhythms of capitalism, have toxified the air, rendering it unbreathable for many and forcing new regimes of inequality upon us all. Oceans of Air flows towards shared responsibilities with the worlds we inhabit, knowing that not all have the right to breathe, and that not all breathe the same air.’

Saraceno is known for his long-standing interest in, and work with, spiders. His international community research project ‘Arachnophilia’ has seen him collaborate with humans, spiders and their webs for more than ten years, charting a multitude of ideas and concepts. At Mona he has installed a series of intricate hybrid webs—dynamic living structures woven through with ‘tension and attention’. When a spider departs, the web it leaves behind forms ‘a material memory and diagram of the spider's drift through the air’. Saraceno believes the webs model old and new ways of tuning into and sensing the world.

Other works in Oceans of Air are made from an array of materials including lighter-than-air aerosolar sculptures, fine particle pollution from the skies of Mumbai, air quality samples from across Australia, dust from the museum, radio waves streamed from First Nations Argentina, radio frequencies generated by meteoroids penetrating the earth’s outer atmosphere and recorded from the roof of Saraceno’s Berlin studio, and the leaves of Tasmania’s only deciduous native tree.

A new lutruwita / Tasmania-specific commission is created from plant specimens that have been gathered from sites around nipaluna / Hobart, including cultural burning locations, places that have been burnt by bushfires and hazard-reduction efforts, and Mona's grounds. These herbarium diptych works are the focus of a new publication featuring a collection of perspectives from writers, scientists and thinkers about plant life and the relationships that different cultures have built with nature throughout history.

Mona Senior Curator Emma Pike says: ‘First and foremost, Tomás is a collector of perspectives, looking at the world through many eyes. He is as invested in the conversations which form the foundation of his works as he is in their astonishing outcomes. As a recovering arachnophobe, I have Tomás’s gentle and beautiful interspecies collaborations to thank for reminding me of my own connectedness, from pollution particles to sound waves to the cosmos.’

Mona Artistic Director Olivier Varenne says: ‘I have been drawn to Tomás's work for years for the way he focuses on the infinitesimal and immeasurable; he prompts elemental and complex existential exploration. The light he shines, especially on the universes spun by social spiders, combining their skills to complete their webs and create their nature-culture, gives us in our entangled ecology much to dwell on.’