Entanglements in Time

About

 Shown together for the first time, the works challenge anthropocentric markers of temporality by examining timelines that stretch far beyond the duration of human existence. As humans, we know everything in the world only through comparison of what we already have knowledge of. The illusion that there is some absolute objective reality that is beyond our myth making, beyond metaphor, beyond language, is untrue. For the vast majority of human history, we have seen ourselves as separate from ‘nature’ but an anthropocentric view of the world has proven undoubtedly problematic. Entanglements in Time acknowledges the shortcomings of the anthropocentric frame of reference by placing human existence in the larger context of geological, chemical and biological timelines.

Like philosophers Timothy Morton, Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, the artists refuse the binaries that have structured Western thought such as self/ other, human/animal, and mind/body in favour of materiality, affectivity and multispecies stories. It is through various acts of storytelling that the artists in Entanglements in Time are able to shed light on ecological entanglements in the vast context of time. The exhibition aims to undo prevalent conceptions of temporality that view progress as inevitable and the past as something that is no longer with us. Neither optimistic nor pessimistic, the artists explore multiple ways of viewing relationships and time in ecological thought. Importantly, agency happens within these relationships and not outside of them. It is by acknowledging how we cannot extricate ourselves from the ‘mesh’ that we can begin to look at ecology as a whole and acknowledge how we are intimately entangled with every living and non-living thing in time.

See entanglementsintime.com to rsvp for the PV and buy limited editions from the artists.