A World Without End
A World Without End
Duo Show Gillian Brett & Hannah Rowan, Curated by Sara Dolfi Agostini
12.03.2024 – 12.05.2024 C+N Gallery CANEPANERI
Via Caffaro 22R – 16124 Genoa
In the preface of The Cyborg Manifesto (1985), the influential American academic Donna J. Haraway envisioned a world without gender, without beginning and without end – free from the ideological dictates of Western capitalist thought and entrusted to a new hybrid entity, a synthesis of human and machine. Forty years later, a symbiotic and emancipated relationship with technology seems impossible in light of the authoritarian and expansionist tendencies that interconnect the physical and digital worlds.
For Gillian Brett, embracing a dissonant position regarding the technocratic ideologies of contemporary society requires an awareness of the destructive impact of technology on both nature and human beings. In the era of the third industrial revolution - characterized by television, informatics, satellites, and artificial intelligence - "what can be produced must be produced," leading to a division between technological imperative and actual human need, as argued by technology philosopher Günther Anders in Man is Outdated Vol. 2 (2007). Faced with the hypothesis of the extinction of a primitive humanity that has lost control over its production systems and over increasingly advanced technology, what remains is an environment irreversibly altered, a landfill growing rapidly, the result of a voracious and greedy society. The world continues, but it is a synthetic, post-mortem, parasitic, and non-generative world that dissipates energy.
In the exhibition, we find the series of works (After Hubble), for which Brett draws inspiration from images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope operated by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), a powerful mechanical eye released into Earth's orbit on April 25, 1990, to observe the Universe, and, thirty years later, it itself becomes a victim of satellite light pollution. Hubble records images of a past through signals intercepted from remote galaxies across time and space, cosmic bubbles, and black holes whose evolution and destruction are independent of human existence. These are images that hold no meaning or causal connection for us, except for the arbitrary aesthetic, cultural, and salvific value we attribute to them.
Brett searches for them on the surface of computer screens, objects elevated to symbols of the overproduction of contemporary society, through a physically demanding process of progressive destruction of hardware, ranging from the fusion of plastics to the disintegration of LCD displays. The scarred screen remains on, waiting for a signal; it's like a halted life spinning in emptiness. Yet these artificial stars, products of a sinister and sick world, exert a strange attraction, like the toxic sunsets enveloping the American Midwest town in Don DeLillo's postmodern novel White Noise (1985). In a disturbing way, they are "intolerably beautiful."
On the ground, a synthetic nature made of high-voltage power cables for electricity distribution creeps onto the gallery floor and walls. Brett first explored this material during the Villa Noailles x Révélations Emerige Prize residency in Toulon last year, imagining its conceptual association with the series of Smart food dedicated to a "bionic" agricultural and food industry, increasingly corrupted by chemicals and processes of artificialization and alteration of the soil. In the works Untitled (Almelec) (2024), technological scraps and leftovers in aluminum and silicone take on the false appearance of branches, roots, and untamed brambles on a post-apocalyptic planet. Brett shapes the same material to obtain leaf molds, all unique and derived from the shape of a motherboard, a printed circuit that dialogues with the various components of a computer and determines its functionalities.
For Hannah Rowan, the rejection of complicity with the idea of technological progress intersects with the radical ecological thought of Astrida Neimanis, author of the influential text Bodies of Water (2017). Neimanis enters the field of study of feminist posthuman philosophy pioneered by Donna Haraway but identifies in water rather than technology the element of union between human and non-human, and the disruptive factor of traditional categories that have constrained and repressed civilization in social, political, and philosophical terms.
In the artist's works, this translates into a constant tension between being and becoming grafted by living forms or their images and inspires her to create "artistic ecosystems" capable of reflecting the triangulation - and conflict - between spontaneous creation, anthropic control, and contamination. Transparent glass evokes water in a solid state, which in turn constitutes the main composition element of bodies, but its shape also evokes vials of laboratory tools, aquarium tanks, and scientific research materials supporting the evolutionary theory of society.
In Carrier (Pond) (2023) and Prima Materia (2024), Rowan uses a lost wax fusion process to create the iron cast of her own joined hands. The position is ritualistic and caring, evoking classical statuary of nymphs and minor nature spirits associated with water, fertility, and rebirth. Hand-blown glass respectively contains an aquatic plant chosen to respond to the environmental conditions of light and temperature in which the work is exhibited, and a fragment of volcanic stone that the artist collected during the performance Prima Materia (Fagradalsfjall) (2022), which is also included in the exhibition in the form of photographic documentation. In Tentacle Vessels (2021), the glass vials take on the appearance of octopus tentacles, to which the aquatic plant adapts organically.
In Oikos (2024), two glass oysters rest on a steel shelf that seems to replicate their curves. The same forms recur in To Hold an Ocean (2024), where the artist's hands support a chain of aluminum-modeled oysters, a material that Rowan associates with technological thinking opposed to metals more traditionally linked to nature and artistic practice. Behind this sculptural synecdoche lies the fact that the shell records and retains the history of the marine environment in which it is found, becoming toxic in port areas and polluted, and edible for humans in protected areas. At the same time, the artist sees in oysters - as in aloe vera leaves similarly cast in aluminum which compose To Bloom Without Soil (2023) - alternative experiences of survival. Oysters attach to each other to reproduce and defend themselves from predators, while aloe leaves can give rise to a new plant even in water or without roots.
In the dual solo exhibition of Brett and Rowan, Haraway's endless world thus assumes hallucinatory traits, among fragmented bodies, replicants, sensory short circuits, and material transformations. Their practices, in some ways complementary, offer a similar physical engagement between the artist's body and material, producing in the viewer a diffuse sense of vulnerability. In this way, they suggest counterpoints or breaks in the compact view that combines technological progress and societal evolution, meeting conceptually not only in the processes and formalization of the work but in the initial theoretical impetus. In fact, their artistic thought converges on a reflection on the fluids that flow through and define reality, from living bodies to technology. Fluids that the artists subject to alchemical processes of fusion and crystallization, echoing the different stages of transformation of the surrounding environment, natural and of anthropic derivation. As noted by Esther Leslie in the seminal text Liquid Crystals. The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (2016), fluids are the liquid crystals of the screens appropriated by Brett and the neutron stars replicated on their surface; the water, glass, and volcanic magma of Rowan; the aluminum alloys and metals cast in the molds of the bodies simulated in artistic form by both. After all, fluid is the primordial broth.
Sara Dolfi Agostini
