Matter as Actor

curated

by

Greg Hilty

3 May – 24 June 2023

27 Bell Street & 67 Lisson Street, London

Opening and performance by Otobong Nkanga: 2 May, 6 – 8pm

Artists, across eras and geographies, have intuitively or consciously given form to material relationships in a unique way. The artwork is never a given and never an end point, but an emergence. Whether the artist aims to depict the material world or the world of the imagination, the work always lands between the two, characterised both by the precision of its presentness and the enigma of its status in the world. The art object is inevitably an instance of becoming, a contingent confluence of the multiple histories of matter.

On a broader human level, there’s a fundamental tension in our relation to the world which is usually easier to ignore in the interest of getting on. Rock, paper, scissors – what could be simpler? Yet the relational game in which these words representing things are invested with shifting power over each other – and the players of the game – signals the multi-dimensionality of our engagements with the world. Anthropologist Tim Ingold perhaps most concisely sums up these overlapping frameworks when he writes, ‘The properties of materials... are not attributes, but histories.’

The worldview in which Matter (the whole of the material world) can be seen as Actor (an active force for change, without necessarily implying intent) has been well established for millennia, evidenced in religious and philosophical traditions framed by the relationality of all things. More mechanistic views which separate the human mind from the material world – seeing the latter as something inert to be tamed and used by the former – have held more sway over the past few centuries of Western influence. But such assumptions, broadly challenged through disciplines as wide-ranging as anthropology and physics, seem inadequate to explain both our own feelings of engagement in the world, and the world’s self-assertion in the face of humanity’s assumed monopoly on agency.

The artists in this exhibition come from many parts of the world and critically engage with the materials associated with their respective cultural inheritances. Their work speaks to the challenges as well as the insights of engaging with the material world across and within distinct cultural frameworks. In giving shape to the conceptual insights of multiple situated knowledge systems, the artists and artworks in the exhibition – spanning both of our London galleries but each given their individual space – attest to the pluralistic grounds of contemporary existence.

Greg Hilty Lisson Gallery

For Dante, just as for Aristotle, space is only the structure of the relations between things, and that structure may adopt peculiar shapes.

—Carlo Rovelli, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important than Kindness

If the composition of the air we breathe depends on living beings, the atmosphere is no longer simply the environment in which living beings are located and in which they evolve; it is, in part, a result of their actions. In other words, there are not organisms on one side and an environment on the other, but a coproduction by both. Agencies are redistributed.

—Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

—Daniel

We say ‘the wind blows’, because the subject-verb structure of the English language makes it difficult to express it otherwise. But in truth, we know that the wind is blowing. Similarly, the stream is the running of water. And so, too, I am what I am doing. I am not an agent but a hive of activity.

We change through our collaborations both within and across species. The important stuff for life on earth happens in those transformations, not in the decision trees of self-contained individuals. Rather than seeing only the expansion-and-conquest strategies of relentless individuals, we must look for histories that develop through contamination.

Allora & Calzadilla’s Electromagnetic Field series, initiated in 2018, take electromagnetism, one of the four fundamental forces of nature, as its subject and medium. The artists experiment with electromagnetism to create forms that are at once abstract and referential. They drop iron filings on top of a canvas and place it above an array of copper cables connected to an electrical breaker in their studio in San Juan, Puerto Rico. When the breaker is turned on, the electrical current forces the particles into an arrangement of shapes and patterns governed by the electromagnetic field.

Attraction and repulsion, strength and weakness, accumulation and dispersal are some of the tools the artists employ to find formal resolution in the electromagnetic works. However, the rhythmic balance achieved does not mute the pulsing forces that condition the very appearance of the artwork – from stock market cycles to fossil fuel combustions. The parenthetical component of the work’s title, a lengthy sequence of numbers and letters that they took from their studio electric bill, refers to the politics related to the generation, ownership, and distribution of electricity.

Allora & Calzadilla have an ongoing interest in using electricity to probe the many facts and figures involved in energy consumption in Puerto Rico and beyond, from the oil futures market and transnational holders of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority’s bond debt to the local consumers who suffer the consequences of the bankrupt power authority’s fiscal mismanagement. Their artistic experiments with electromagnetism are in equal part an exploration of formal principles and a way of confronting the complex nexus that is the energy grid.

Michelle White, head curator of Houston’s Menil Collection and the artists’ solo exhibition ‘Specters of Noon’ in 2020-21, remarked on their approach in her essay: “From the beginning of their partnership in 1995, the duo have explored how socioeconomic inequalities in our contemporary moment collide with the natural world, with all of its marvels and increasingly frightening and overwhelming phenomena. They delight in this discordant and illuminating interaction, which delves into unlikely connections and ignites revealing conversations. Pulling substances, materials, and sounds out of particular contexts, histories, or sites, these works move the viewer through wildly divergent temporal, material, political, and theoretical terrains.”

This selection of works from a series of more than 60 unique silver gelatin shadowgrams, entitled Socorro! (2021–22) by American artist Lucy Raven, record the elemental pressures of air and raw materials from a number of explosive events by exposing photosensitive paper for micro-seconds after detonation. Her empirical experiments, using a stroboscopic flash within a custom-built, room-sized black box at a Ballistics Sciences Lab, resulted in these subtly inflected abstractions, rendered as silhouettes with occasional impact marks created by flying debris. Raven’s images are witness to the unseen forces of blast waves as they radiate away from the source towards the surface of each unique shadowgram, transforming material forces into abstract marks and physical remnants in the wake of these extreme events.

Raven constructed her purpose-built camera obscura on an explosives range in New Mexico, typically employed as a test site by the US Departments of Defense and Energy, as well as by private munitions companies. The town where the explosives range is located was given its name, Socorro (meaning ‘succour’ or ‘relief’), by ailing Spanish settlers when Piro Native Americans welcomed them with water. Raven became interested in this location, which is also close to the very first sites of nuclear weapon testing, while filming for the second of a cinematic trilogy of latter-day Westerns, each of which investigates properties of pressure, force, and material transformation in relation to the Western United States, past and present. Writing on these films, Lucy R Lippard noted that “Raven is a master of slow time and mesmerizing close-ups contrasted with flashes of surrounding action, following the industrial alchemy by which fluid materials turn to solids and vice versa.”

Lucy Raven’s distinct and methodical practice combines an extended and interdisciplinary enquiry into the form, function and apparatus of the moving image – whether animated, digital, mechanical or cinematic – with an ongoing appreciation for the landscapes, labours and myths surrounding the American West. Whether through audiovisual collage or phenomenological experience, Raven’s important deep-dives into systems of power, imagemaking and filmic history are reflected back upon by the viewer as self-generating narratives forged by their means and manner of production.

Born in 1962 in China

Lives and works in Beijing, China

Zhan Wang

Match Openings: Scrawls of Visions No.10 , 2022, ink on rice paper, 34 x 34 cm; 13 3/8 x 13 3/8 in

Match Openings: Particle No.6 , 2022, stainless steel, 122 x 133 x 98 cm; 48 x 52 3/8 x 38 5/8 in

Zhan Wang’s presentation, collectively titled Match Openings, following the first positions in a chess game, includes his latest body of sculptural works and ink paintings. The sculptures are an evolution of his stainless-steel artificial replicas of the ‘scholar’s rocks’ traditionally found in Chinese gardens. Zhan applies the philosophical concept of the Dichotomy Paradox to the segmentation of each stone, before reconstructing the fragments to make an ever-expanding set of new modules. The mirrored surfaces of these previously organic objects are arranged on a tessellating grid of nine plinths that rotate and morph on a weekly basis, in formations that represent light, air, earth/ocean/plant, star, fish/insect, human/animal, and finally, rest. This conceptual and lyrical bed of stones stimulates philosophical slippage between the natural and manmade worlds, between the technological and the archaeological, but also between energies, elements and materials.

The ink paintings on rice paper shown alongside the sculptures are placed within two five-by-five matrices. Operating under a strict rule that the brushstrokes not overlap or touch each other, the artist seeks to paint with near-absolute spontaneity, resulting in abstraction and a similar, shifting mode of conceptual, time-based display that, in his own words, is “both accidental and inevitable”.

Zhan Wang is widely recognized as one of China’s leading contemporary artists working today. Through installation, photography and video, his sculpturally-informed practice challenges ideas of landscape and environment, addressing the urban, rural, artificial and industrial. Zhan’s art is fundamentally anchored in his relationship to his own cultural heritage. In addition to his celebrated series on scholar’s rocks, the artist further explores his fascination with material and reflection in a series of works titled Urban Landscape in which Zhan recreates models of major cities, such as London, Beijing and Chicago using kitchenware and cutlery. The process of miniaturising an urban sprawl through the use of domestic and ordinary objects calls forth the basic necessities of life, despite the rapid modernisation of contemporary society.

Born in 1979 in Kenya

Lives and works in Nairobi, Kenya