PARIS.- The root prefix pluri- comes from the Latin plur-, meaning plus, many, or more than one: Multi. The pluriverse challenges the modernist ontology of universalism or universal truth in favor of what could become a poetic multiplicity of possible worlds and means of expression. It challenges the idea that European scientific rationalism is epistemically superior to all other traditions. No single epistemology, or any of the social, cultural, or technological relations that it produces, can be allowed to dominate at the expense of the expression of others. Many ways of doing and thinking coexist in and as an intensity that is without boundaries. Subaltern, Indigenous, Dialectical, Scientific-Rational, and Digital epistemologies, to name just a few, are all embraced, cared for, and given voice and song. This does not entail the tearing down, annihilation, or exclusion of Western rational-scientific methods, as some have mistakenly assumed, it instead means making room for other forms of wisdom, forms produced with other practical methods over deep geological time: inciting and unlocking emerging tendencies though mutual entanglement for the betterment of all, enlarging the dimension of the space (gallery), complexifying the language of aesthetics and expanding the house rules (art system). Pluriverse thus suggests an alternative future history of humbling, composting, strangeness, and deep ecological sustainability.
This is where this exhibition takes off. The Madrid- and New York-based artist Elena Bajo uses generative AI to create her work Words Buried in Your Petals (Datura Dreams). Two works make up this project and will be exhibited at the gallery. The first is An Exhortation of the Cheater, 2023. These uncomfortably beautiful textiles are woven with a Jacquard loom—an early algorithmic method of weaving, invented in the nineteenth century, that Bajo has appropriated for these quasi-sculptures. Under the self-induced hallucinogenic effects of the indigenous plant Datura, Bajo first fabricates her work by hand, assembling abstract fragments of found textiles into preliminary works. These are then digitally photographed, and the data thus produced is fed into Google Deep Dream, which outputs them in a new form: as anamorphic, suspended, textile works that are composed of a multiplicity of multicolored whorls or eyes. This “software surrealism” is the result of the twenty-first century transmateriality (as Karan Barad has described that concept in her book Transmaterialities) of human, animal, and digital-machinic consciousness. Bajo’s work is a psychedelic experiment that poses the question: Can one induce a “trip” in a machine? The second work is entitled A Space to Reign (2013–23) and is composed of hand-crafted Datura Stramonium seeds cast in 24 karat gold situated beneath a divinatory crystal ball, The crystal ball contains a variety of other materials—glass, mirror, ceramic fragments, light, plant parts, fabric scraps and soil—through which the seeds can be inspected. Situated at three locations in the gallery, these divinatory sculptures operate as central nodes in networks of aesthetic and shamanistic forecasting. A planned performative reading of a poem written by Bajo entitled “Devil’s Trumpet a Predicament of the Fool” will reactivate the installation.
Edgar Calel (Guatemala, 1987) explores the complexities of the indigenous experience, as seen through the Mayan Kaqchikel cosmovision, spirituality, rituals, community practices, and beliefs, in juxtaposition with the systematic racism and exclusion that the indigenous people of Guatemala endure on a daily basis.
He will show two videos: Qetalh ri qa Winaqi pa Säq siwan, El rastro de nuestra gente en el abismo blanco, 2014, (The trace of our people in the white abyss, 2017) and At nu jukukempe, 2017, Te traigo arrastrando, 2017 (I bring you dragging, 2017).
In Qetalh ri qa Winaqi pa Säq siwan,2014, we are introduced to the artist instrucing a child on how to place her feet on a sketch book filled with white pieces of paper. He stabilizes her legs with his hands and pushes down so that her bare soiled feet leave a red clay footprint in the empty white space. She steps away and leaves a trace of red earth as a memory and documentation of the event. In a final gesture he blows away the excess before turning the page, readying it for the next performer. He instructs the next actor and, as he does so, she scrapes the red earth with her soles so as to accumulate more soil for her sole printing. This process is repeated until, finally, a pet monkey of one of the participants leaves its tiny paw prints on the paper. The monkey is also understood as being part of the community. This work is part Calel’s political practice concerning the struggle for the ownership and defense of the land, which is tied to his people’s ways of life. The performance is a form of census—a recorded proof of his people’s existence and their posession of the land.
In the opening scene of At nu jukukempe, 2017, the camera frame is first filled with an empty path. Moments later he artist pierces the frame and enters the path wearing an orange shirt, holding a white Zantedeschia Aethiopica, and dragging the leafy branch of a tree by his hair. His eyes and face are obscured by a mask of corn root. The flowers are offerings to the sacred hills. Somehow he finds his way, in spite of this sensorial obscurification. “My idea is that our words have their roots in the land and bloom in us and the air.” The work is furthermore connected to Calel’s ideas concerning memory, embodiment, and history. He states that “Our bodies have different roots and branches that occupy not only the physical but also the abstract spaces. For example, I have myself neither lived [through] the Guatemalan armed conflict, nor the Spanish invasion, but as fear is inherited, this memory is present in my contemporaneity.” We see the artist walk off screen at the one-minute mark, and only the soundtrack makes us aware of his presence somewhere out of sight, in the distance. The video ends with a horizontal scan-camera movement through the forest, along the path formerly occupied by Calel. It finally comes to rest in a dark unfocused part of the tree trunk, beyond recordability, sense, and understanding.
Warren Neidich (Berlin, New York), in his neon glass sculpture A Proposition for an Alt-Parthenon Marbles Recoded: The Phantom as Other # 2, (2023), proposes that the illusory sensations of imaginary phantom limbs might operate metaphorically as a means of empowerment to the future despotism of what the French political philosopher Antoinette Rouvroy calls algorithmic governmentality or what Bonaventura de Sousa Santaos calls epistemicide. Neidich’s work is directed against the recurring cycle of historical expropriation and algorithmic bias that seems to be at the heart of the Enlightenment and that is manifesting itself again in our present- and future-biased algorithmic culture (based on, for instance, Chat GPT). This speculative philosophical sculpture is presented as a deep learning neural network or open AI, beginning with a photo of the Parthenon Marbles—formerly known as the Elgin Marbles— fixed to aluminum and situated at the bottom of the work and forming its inner layer. The inner layer of deep learning networks is the entry point for patterns of data and is the first step of processing. Psychic energy emanates from two sources in the sculpture. The first is the ghosts that emerge from the imaginary phantom limbs of the marbles’ amputated arms and legs, which represent the other, ancestral energy, queering, the post-colonial, and the specter of Marx. These mix or blend in with the second source which are emanations from the human-like figures that make up the image of the classical sculpture itself. (This sculpture and others like it from the classical period helped to form the basis of the scientific-rational discourse of the Western European Enlightenment tradition.) The two inputs blend, in the process educating, pruning, and assembling the connections of the next processing layer or the hidden layer(s) of the open AI. This induction transforms the connections at the beginning of the hidden layer—connections such as Western civilization, the universal museum, and algorithmic bias—into new components such as composting, cognitive justice, and the pluriverse. These constitute in turn the output that transforms the digital singularity into the alt-singularity. (The singularity is a term invented by Ray Kurzweil to describe the hypothetical moment at which machine intelligence might outperform human intelligence.) Neidich’s alt-Singularity is a cybernetic post-human superintelligence that is global, affective, and caring, in contrast to the optimized and repetitive dystopian Kurzweillian right-wing accelerationist nightmare.
The New Delhi-based installation artist Mithu Sen presents two works. The first, How to be a SUCKsuccessful Artist, 2019, is a black-and-white instructional video that uses “poker face” satire to address the avarice of the art world and the models of capitalistic productivity that it prioritizes, especially in relation to artists of the Global South. The video rolls behind the image of the artist performing a pedagogical satire as a goddess who battles the demons of the world with her many flailing arms. The work is tongue-in-cheek and joins other works of institutional critique such as those of Andrea Fraser or, more notably, Lee Lozano’s General Strike Piece (1969). How To Unmake a Paper (2019) the second of Sen’s works exhibited here, is a spoof of Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961), which is a three and a half hour soundtrack recording of Morris making a wood cube. In Sen’s work, an origami paper boat is the focus of an unfolding disassembly process that stands in for one of her larger interests—foregrounded in her recent solo show Mothertongue, exhibited at the Australian Center of Contemporary Art—which she calls lingual anarchy. Origami also has a specific set of rules and grammars, and, as such, this reenactment and parody of Morris’s work is a metaphor for the deconstruction of language, with its emphasis on racism and patriarchy.
All together these works form an ecology of aesthetics that opens new doors of perception and generates a plurality of spirit. We are the Pluriverse.
---Warren Neidich, Paris, 2023
THE ARTISTS
Elena Bajo is an artist, educator, choreographer and founder of the P-A-D Project, Wonder Valley in the Californian desert, dedicated to ecological activism. Her multidisciplinary practice investigates ideas of space, nature, and the body as a political and social entity questioning its relationship to ecologies of capital. Using ancestral methods and her multidisciplinary art practice she mines vibrant plant systems in order to discover their unique form of consciousness. Her focus is on the research and recuperation of ancestral ethno-botanical ontologies. She works both individually and collectively, using choreography, sculpture, performance, painting, poetry, and video.
She received an MFA from Central Saint Martins, (London, UK) and an MA in Genetic Architecture from ESARQ UIC (Barcelona, ES), studied Laban and Bartenieff Movement at TanzFabrik, Berlin Contemporary Dance Center. She has presented performances, exhibited and taught internationally. She also received support, grants and residencies from LMCC Art Center, Governors Island NY, US 2023; Rauschenberg EMGrants, 2022; NARS Studio Relief, 2022: Matadero Madrid Residency, A/CE ES for EKWC European Ceramic Work Center, NL, 2021; Hopper Prize 2020; NY Contemporary Art Foundation Emergency Grant 2019; Botín Foundation, Visual Arts Fellowship Award, ES 2018; Audemars Piguet Award, ARCOMadrid, ES 2017.
Edgar Calel (b. 1987, Chi Xot -San Juan Comalapa, Guatemala) studied at the Escuela Nacional de Arte Rafael Rodríguez Padilla. He works in a variety of media, exploring the complexities of the indigenous experience, as seen through the Mayan Kaqchikel cosmovision, spirituality, rituals, community practices, and beliefs, in juxtaposition with the systematic racism and exclusion that the indigenous people of Guatemala endure on a daily basis.
He recently had his first solo exhibition Pa Ru Tun Che´ (From a Tree Top) at Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City, (2021); and has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Is It Morning for You Yet?, 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2022); The Crack Begins Within, 11th Berlin Biennial, Berlin (2020); Los Jardineros (The Gardeners), Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City (2020); Continuous Fire | Feu continuel, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario (2019); Virginia Pérez Ratton. Centroamérica: Deseo de lugar / Centra America, MUAC Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2019).
His works are part of the permanent collections of Tate, UK; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; the National Gallery of Canada, Ontario; Fundación TEOR/ética, San José, Costa Rica; MADC Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, San José, Costa Rica; and Kadist, San Francisco. Additionally, he has participated in artistic residencies including Tropical Papers (2021); Residencia Rua do Sol, Portugal (2019), and at Lastro research platform, Brazil, 2015), among others.
American artist and theorist Warren Neidich works between Berlin and New York City. He was trained in fine art, architecture, and neuroscience. In the past five years he has used written texts, neon-light sculptures, paintings, and photographs to create cross-pollinating conceptual works that reflect upon situations at the border zones of art, critical neuroscience, and cognitive justice. He is founder and director of the Saas Fee Summer Institute of Art since 2015. Awards include Maison Sugar Research Fellowship, Paris, 2023, Getty Research Foundation Award, 2022, Stiftung Kunstfonds NEUSTART KULTUR (2020 and 2021), Hauptstadtkulturfonds (2021), and Katalogförderung des Berliner Senats (2017), Vilém Flusser Theory Award, Transmediale (2010). Selected one-person and group exhibitions include the Venice Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, P.S.1 MOMA, Walker Art Center, MIT, List Visual Art Center, (Cambridge), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Museum of American Art (Washington D.C., US), Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Villa Arson, Nice, Museum Ludwig (Köln, Germany), Haus Der Kunst (Munich), Zentrum für Kunst and Media (Karlsruhe, Germany), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin, Germany), Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, and Kunsthalle (Nuremburg,Germany) He is former tutor at Goldsmiths College, London, and professor of visual art at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule, Berlin. He has been a visiting lecturer in the Departments of Art at Brown University, GSD Harvard University, Columbia University, Princeton University, the Sorbonne in Paris, France, the University of Oxford and Cambridge University in the UK and many others. His work has been the subject of over 150 magazine and newspaper articles, including The New York Times, Time Magazine, Artforum, Art in America, Kunstforum International, The Art Newspaper, Hyperallergic, Artnet, GQ, Forbes, and Monopol. The fourth edition of his Glossary of Cognitive Activism will be released in the fall by Eris Press, UK in collaboration with Columbia University Press,NYC. Archive Books, Berlin has just released An Activist Neuroaesthetic Reader.
Mithu Sen explores myths of identity, and their intersection with the structures of our world, whether social, political, economic, or emotional. Sen works fundamentally as a performer, tangling with the politics of language, disciplining of bodies, conventions of society, and polite impositions of the art world. Known for her provocative, alluring, and playful examination of these hierarchies, Sen is committed to perpetual unbecoming through performative interventions, symbolic and linguistic counter-narratives and intricate territorial tracings. The by-products of her conceptual practice take the forms of drawings, poems, performances, videos, glitches, new media and instructional interventions.
Sen received her BFA (1995) and MFA (1997) from Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, India; and a PG diploma (2001) from the Glasgow School of Art, UK.
Sen has exhibited and performed in major international forums including Sharjah Biennale 15, UAE (2023); sonsbeek 20-24, Arnhem, the Netherlands (2021); APT9-9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2018); Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg (2018); Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai (2018); Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (2017); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2016); Unlimited: Art Basel (2016); Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan, USA (2014); Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014); Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna (2014); Dhaka Art Summit (2014); Tate Modern Project Space, London (2013); Zacheta Museum, Warsaw (2011); and National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2008), among other forums and institutions.
She recently had her major survey show of the last two decades at ACCA, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne.
She was awarded the Skoda Prize in 2010 and the Prudential Eye Award for Contemporary Asian Art – Drawing in 2015.
Sen lives and works in New Delhi, India.
