The Ecologies of Peace

 

Nel terzo anno di collaborazione fra C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, della Città di Córdoba, e TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary viene realizzato il progetto " The Ecologies of Peace" una mostra, con oltre 50 opere d'arte e sei nuove commissioni, che propone spazi per il dialogo e la giustizia sociale in un mondo segnato da guerre e conflitti.

La mostra incarna l’impegno di entrambe le istituzioni nei confronti dell’arte e della cultura come portatori di trasformazione sociale e ambientale al servizio della costruzione della pace globale.

Con oltre 50 opere della Collezione TBA21 e sei nuove commissioni curate da Daniela Zyman, la mostra mira a ridefinire il concetto di pace

Il programma di apertura prevede, tra le altre attività, un concerto dell'artista di flamenco PERRATE presso la Sala Orive e incontri con artisti come Candice Breitz, Fiona Banner, Maksym Rokmaniko, Marina Otero Verzier e Cristina Lucas al C3A.

Curata da Daniela Zyman, la mostra sarà allestita fino al 30 marzo 2025 al C3A di Córdoba e vuole mettere in risalto l'impegno delle istituzioni nei confronti dell'arte e della cultura come agenti di trasformazione sociale e ambientale, andando oltre la tradizionale nozione di pace come mera assenza di guerra .

Separando la nozione di pace dalla “guerra” e dalla sua tradizionale associazione con il conflitto armato e riconoscendo invece che la guerra comprende la sottomissione coloniale; occupazione; la creazione di enclavi segregate, dove vengono confinate le comunità emarginate; l'imposizione militarizzata della forza durante le proteste civili; violenza di genere; e le pratiche estrattive violente che portano all’ecocidio, The Ecologies of Peace tenta di offrire una comprensione più profonda dell’opera di trasformazione della pace. Questa prospettiva suggerisce che la pace non implica solo la fine della guerra, ma anche l’attenzione e l’impegno di pratiche sociali e individuali per affrontare, riconciliare e riparare le perdite, gli infortuni e le ferite che tormentano sia le società post-conflitto che quelle pre-conflitto.

Cristina Lucas varie Textiles - The Ecologies of Peace. Works from the TBA21 Collection, Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía C3A, Córdoba, Spain, 2024 foto  Imagen Subliminal (Rocio Romero y Miguel de Guzmán)

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 In the third year of collaboration with C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, in partnership with the City of Córdoba, TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary presents The Ecologies of Peace. The exhibition, featuring over 50 artworks and six new commissions, proposes spaces for dialogue and social justice in a world marked by war and conflict.

Curated by Daniela Zyman, the exhibition will be on display until March 30th 2025 at C3A in Córdoba and embodies the institutions’ commitment to art and culture as agents of social and environmental transformation, going beyond the traditional notion of peace as a mere absence of war.

By disentangling the notion of peace from “war” and its traditional association with armed conflict and instead recognizing war as encompassing colonial subjugation; occupation; the creation of segregated enclaves, where marginalized communities are confined; the militarized imposition of force during civil protests; gender-based violence; and violent extractive practices leading to ecocide, The Ecologies of Peace attempts to offer a deeper understanding of the transformational work of peace. This perspective suggests that peace does not only entail an end to warfare, but also attending to and devoting social and individual practices to addressing, reconciling, and repairing the losses, injuries, and wounds that haunt both post-conflict and pre-conflict societies.

The Ecologies of Peace delves into the protracted military engagement in Ukraine, explores the enduring aftermath of colonialism, racism, and the carceral system, exposes the effects of patriarchal orders, and navigates the complex histories of conflict in the Middle East, which form the backdrop to the virulent eruption of war in October 2023. Furthermore, it scrutinizes the intricate topography of (future) conflicts driven by the addiction to fossil fuels, resource extractivism, and environmental catastrophes. Within these conflict-ridden scenarios, the exhibition foregrounds a rich repertoire of investigative methodologies from the applied tools of counter-forensics and the meticulous archiving of the war machinery to the evocative power of storytelling, philosophical speculation, and prefigurative politics. 

The Ecologies of Peace brings together more than 50 works by national and international artists from the TBA21 Collection around new ideas to explore paths towards reparation as well as evidence, stories and memories of trauma and conflict scenarios.

Exhibiting artists include Fiona Banner, Angela Davis, Jenny Holzer and Candice Breitz. In Córdoba, Breitz presents LEGEND (A Portrait of Bob Marley), 2005, one of the earliest commissions by the TBA21 Foundation, which consists of a 30-channel audiovisual installation. In this piece the artist explores the contrasts between the Bob Marley who has become a global brand outside of Jamaica, and the Bob Marley who was described with great respect by Jamaicans during his first visit to the island.

Walid Raad  Scratching on things I could disavow: Appendix XVIII: Plates 063-257, 2012 The Ecologies of Peace. Works from the TBA21 Collection, Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía C3A, Córdoba, Spain, 2024 foto  Imagen Subliminal (Rocio Romero y Miguel de Guzmán)

The exhibition includes six new commissions, such as Bitter Things by Palestinian artist Mirna Bamieh, a multimedia installation about oranges from her hometown and C3A, tracing a journey from ancient times through colonization and occupation stories.

The Ecologies of Peace also includes an installation by the collective The Center for Spatial Technologies with the support of the renowned artistic research agency Forensic Architecture, titled Memory Theatre. This installation recreates the destruction of the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater in Mariupol, Ukraine, following the Russian air strike on the morning of March 16, 2022.

The Ecologies of Peace includes works by Spanish artists such as Álvaro Urbano, Cristina Garrido, Lorenzo Sandoval, and Cristina Lucas. The latter will present three banners outside the museum depicting bombings during the Spanish Civil War, in Ukraine, and the Gaza Strip, as well as three iron sculptures depicting the routes of globalization associated with trade that have shaped our relationship with the planet in one of the C3A courtyards. Additionally, Lucas will display a series of embroidered maps (tuftings) highlighting the intensity of aerial bombings in various conflicts.

Artists

Exhibiting artists include: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, John Akomfrah, Allora & Calzadilla, Lucas Arruda, Mirna Bamieh, Fiona Banner, Neïl Beloufa, Monica Bonvicini, Candice Breitz, Janet Cardiff, The Center for Spatial Technologies with the support of Forensic Architecture, Manthia Diawara, Ryan Gander, Cristina Garrido, Ayrson Heráclito, Jenny Holzer, Marine Hugonnier, Saodat Ismailova, Sanja Iveković, Nikita Kadan, Samson Kambalu, Amar Kanwar, Armin Linke, Cristina Lucas, Goshka Macuga, Pavlo Makov, Ursula Mayer, Joiri Minaya, Olaf Nicolai, Daniel Otero Torres, Jasbir Puar y Dima Srouji, The Propeller Group, Walid Raad/The Atlas Group, Lisa Rave, Lorenzo Sandoval, Allan Sekula, Vivian Suter, Sissel Tolaas, Suzanne Treister, Álvaro Urbano and Akram Zaatari.

The Ecologies of Peace concludes the trilogy of exhibitions developed by the foundation and C3A over the past three years in the city of Córdoba, addressing the interests that shape TBA21's work and collection: ecology and environmental care, the recovery of ancestral knowledge from various indigenous communities, and regenerative processes and the construction of peace and social justice. These lines of work constitute the foundational principles of TBA21 and have guided the foundation's trajectory.

 The Ecologies of Peace. Works from the TBA21 Collection, Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía C3A, Córdoba, Spain, 2024 foto  Imagen Subliminal (Rocio Romero y Miguel de Guzmán)

Opening program

The exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive program of activities this weekend, which will bring together national and international figures of great relevance in talks, performances and presentations. Thus, the opening speeches will be given by Olga Rodríguez, journalist, researcher and writer specializing in the Middle East and Human Rights, and Maksym Rokmanik, from the Center for Spatial Technologies, at 7pm. This will be followed by the performance Tres golpes_redux, by the flamenco artist PERRATE with Paco de Amparo on guitar, which will take place at 9pm at Sala Orive.

On Saturday 27th April, the program will kick off at 11am with the workshop Sour Things, by Mirna Bamieh, followed by the presentation of the book Meandering: Art, Ecology, and Metaphysics. At 6pm, curator Daniela Zyman and exhibition director Marina Avia Estrada will coordinate the talks Towards the World We Want, featuring artists such as Candice Breitz, Fiona Banner, Maksym Rokmaniko, Marina Otero Verzier and Cristina Lucas. The day will end with the concert To the Hands, performed by the Brouwer Choir, at 9pm. All these activities will take place in the Caja Negra space at C3A. 

TBA21 porterà Ocean Space prossimamente a Venezia

Copyright: © Church of San Lorenzo, Venice (Chiesa San Lorenzo, Venezia),

 the home of 'Ocean Space' from summer 2019. Photo: TBA21

La Fondazione TBA21 di Vienna da lavorando per aprire il prossimo anno, durante la 58. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte, un nuovo spazio culturale dedicato agli oceani presso la ex-chiesa di San Lorenzo, vicino all'Arsenale, che la fondazione stessa sta restaurando.

L'OceanSpace sarà un punto di raccolta del lungo percorso che la fondazione da diversi anni sta sviluppando sul tema della salvaguardia dei mari con una visione artista, coinvolgente artisti e attivandosi verso una fruizione attiva del pubblico.

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Major multi-media commission Armin Linke: Prospecting Ocean opens May 23, 2018 at Institute of Marine Sciences (CNR-ISMAR) in Venice in prelude to next year’s launch.

Venice, Italy—May 22, 2018—Francesca von Habsburg, Founder and Executive Producer of TBA21–Academy, today announced the opening of Ocean Space in summer 2019. Ocean Space will serve as an ideas accelerator for TBA21–Academy, a nomadic academy that fosters collaboration among artists, scientists, policy makers, and frontline leadership from climate-change hotspots in cross-disciplinary explorations, catalyzing ocean literacy, research, and advocacy through the arts. Headquartered in the newly restored Church of San Lorenzo in Venice, Ocean Space will provide facilities for installations, performances, workshops, archives, and research for TBA21–Academy and the organizations across the globe with which it collaborates. 

Ocean Space will both extend and build upon the work of TBA21–Academy, which was founded in 2011. Recent initiatives organized by the non-collecting, non-profit organization have included:

The launch of the second cycle of The Current, the Academy’s signature exploratory fellowship program that fosters joint research and knowledge-production by artists, scientists, and indigenous leadership from such climate-change harbinger nations as Tonga, Papua New Guinea, and New Zealand. The leaders of the current three-year program are artist collective SUPERFLEX and curator Chus Martínez

The organization of cross-disciplinary workshops and programs in conjunction with major international policy-setting conferences, including the first United Nations Oceans Conference in New York and UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn. These events have drawn together such artists as Joan Jonas and Mark Dion; scientists Walter Munk and Sylvia Earle; policy makers Thomas Remengesau, Jr. President of Palau, and Kalani English, Majority Leader of the Hawaii State Legislature.

The ongoing international tour of Tidalectics, TBA21–Academy’s first exhibition providing an oceanic worldview and featuring work by some 20 artists, including Doug Aitken, Tue Greenfort, Janaina Tschape, and Julian Charrière—many of which resulted from the artists’ travels with TBA21–Academy. The exhibition opens at the Museum of Modern of Art Dubrovnik and the Franciscan Monastery of Lopud in early July 2018 In addition, TBA21–Academy and MIT Press co-published a compendium of research surrounding Tidalectics, including seminal essays by Epeli Hau‘ofa, Stefan Helmreich, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, and Philip E. Steinberg, among others.

Commissioning of major new works of art, including Purple by John Akomfrah, an immersive installation exploring climate change, rising sea levels, and extreme weather events in the age of the Anthropocene, which premiered at the Barbican in London in fall 2017; and the investigative exhibition Prospecting Ocean by Armin Linke, opening in coordination with the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale at the Institute of Marine Sciences of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR-ISMAR), which investigates the tension between ecological protection of our oceans and their political and economic exploitation. 

“With its emphasis on processes, research, and transdisciplinary co-creation, TBA21–Academy sparks new approaches to addressing the urgent challenges surrounding our ocean and aims to inspire participation and solution finding,” stated Director Markus Reymann. “We are creating the Ocean Space to serve as a Global Commons, a place that synthesizes a range of knowledge systems and welcomes a wide range of disciplines and the general public to jointly imagine a radically different future on our planet.” 

“We selected Venice as the global port for TBA21–Academy as it has long been a center for international exchange. Historically, the city served as a critical link between Europe and some of the furthest places around the world though trade and the navigation of the high seas. Today, Venice’s Biennales and festivals convene leading artists, architects, and filmmakers from around the world, which, in turn, attract great audiences in an incredible exchange of ideas. At the same time, Venice suffers from many of same problems that other nations are struggling with—rising sea levels—which directly connects it with the islands throughout the Pacific, where many of our programs are focused,” stated von Habsburg. 

Further details about Ocean Space’s inaugural program and facilities will be shared in the coming months. 

ABOUT TBA21–ACADEMY

Founded by Francesca von Habsburg and drawing on her experience as a producer of cross-disciplinary art installations and socially engaged cultural programming, TBA21–Academy leads artists, scientists, and thought-leaders on expeditions of collaborative discovery. Its mission is to foster a deeper understanding of our ocean through the lens of art and to engender creative solutions to its most pressing issues. Led by Director Markus Reymann, the itinerant Academy commissions interdisciplinary research that catalyzes engagement, stimulates new knowledge, and inspires artistic production. TBA21–Academy’s program is informed by a belief in the power of exchange between disciplines and in the ability of the arts as a vessel for communication, change, and action. Established in 2011, TBA21–Academy is a non-profit, non-collecting research organization, supported by individuals, foundations, universities, government agencies, and corporate philanthropies.

EPHEMEROPTERÆ

The sixth season debuts on June 2, 2017 at 7pm with performances by Jana Winderen and Em’kal Eyongakpa to coincide with the opening of TIDALECTICS at TBA21–Augarten, Vienna

EPHEMEROPTERÆ, TBA21’s annual spoken-word performance series held since 2012 in the Augarten Park brings together, artists, poets, musicians, scientists, architects, and philosophers to explore the rich traditions and evanescent articulations of poetry, literature, theory, performance, and language-based artistic practice. These unique, open-air acts complement TBA21’s exhibitions and are based on forms of “staged knowledge” or “performative rhetoric”, embodied forms of discourse and articulation, which create spaces of imagination and inspiration.EPHEMEROPTERÆ offers an arena dedicated to the nature and the experience of oral and performative practices and reveals itself as a potent and thought-provoking site of contemporary expression. 

The sixth season of EPHEMEROPTERÆ accompanies the exhibition TIDALECTICS, which proposes a new mode of commitment to the oceans, a mode coming from the seas themselves, focusing on the poetic, mythical, spiritual, and solidary dimensions of the oceans. TIDALECTICSis a term coined by the celebrated poet-historian Kamau Brathwaite and the exhibition features works that have come about as a result of the TBA21–Academy and its ground-breaking research and exploration trips, as well as other works by artists whose practice is profoundly dedicated to the oceans. 

The sixth edition of EPHEMEROPTERÆ accompanies and complements these ideas by engaging with themes related to the oceans, deep ecologies, and ecofeminisms, with oceanic sciences, ecopedagogy, aquatic soundscapes, and speculative poetics. Participants in the 2017 season include: Ursula Biemann, Benjamin Bratton, Em’kal Eyongakpa, Warwick Fox, Ellie Ga, David Gruber, Florian Hecker, David Horvitz, Joan Jonas, Hilary Koob Sassen, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jonathan Ledgard, Chus Martinez, Nicola Masciandaro, Astrida Neimanis, Trevor Paglen, Josef Penninger, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Markus Reymann, Nainoa Thompson, Janaina Tschäpe, Jana Winderen, Susanne M. Winterling, and Peter Zinovieff.

Offered free of charge, the individual 40 to 60-minute live-acts are diverse in both content and form, and are repeated on a weekly basis throughout the summer from June to September (with a summer break between July 15–August 24).

Presented in the open air, under a canopy of trees, EPHEMEROPTERÆ takes place on a stage structure designed by the London-based architect David Adjaye. The stage consists of a trapezoidal prism made of timber slats, which frames the view of the surrounding park and references, poignantly, the proscenium of classic theater. 

EPHEMEROPTERÆ 2017 is curated by Daniela Zyman and Boris Ondreička with Stefanie Hessler and Markus Reymann.

Please note that the program is subject to change, please confirm dates at www.tba21.org/ephemeropterae. Performances begin at 7 pm and take place on Fridays from June to September in the TBA21–Augarten.

June 2 

Jana Winderen / Em’kal Eyongakpa

June 9 

Jonathan Ledgard / Trevor Paglen 

June 16 

Josef Penninger / Markus Reymann / Peter Zinovieff 

June 23 

Joan Jonas / Nicola Masciandaro 

June 30 

Hilary Koob Sassen / Chus Martinez  

July 7 

Ellie Ga / Astrida Neimanis 

July 14 

Benjamin Bratton / Florian Hecker 

August 25 

Warwick Fox / David Horvitz 

September 1 

Ursula Biemann / Nainoa Thompson 

September 8 

Elizabeth A. Povinelli / Susanne M. Winterling  

September 15 

David Gruber / Linton Kwesi Johnson / Janaina Tschäpe 

ABOUT THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA ART CONTEMPORARY 

Founded in 2002 by Francesca von Habsburg in Vienna, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary represents the fourth generation of the Thyssen family’s commitment to the arts. TBA21’s unique collection is the result of its ongoing commitment to commissioning and disseminating multidisciplinary art projects that defy traditional categorisation, including large scale installations, sound compositions, endurance performances, and contemporary architecture. Since the foundation believes that art has the capacity to be a transformational force, it explores new modes of presentation that are intended to provoke and inspire change.

INFORMATION

tba21.org/ephemeropterae

#TBA21

#ephemeropterae

Location

Upcoming exhibition

TIDALECTICS

June 2–November 19, 2017

TBA21–Augarten, Scherzergasse 1a, 1020 Vienna, Austria

Wednesday and Thursday 12–5 pm

Friday to Sunday 12–7 pm

Closed on Monday and Tuesday

Free admission 

TBA21–Academy’s first exhibition, TIDALECTICS, explores a different way of engaging with the oceans and the world we inhabit

TBA21–Academy is the exploratory soul of Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna. Conceived by Markus Reymann in 2012 as an itinerant site of cultural production and interdisciplinary research to deepen our understanding of and relationship to the oceans, TBA21–Academy is delighted to announce the opening of its first exhibition, Tidalectics, on Friday, June 2 in Vienna. The exhibition is timed to coincide with the first-ever United Nations’ Ocean Conference, held in New York from June, 5-9.

Curated by Stefanie Hessler, Tidalectics presents thirteen artists whose distinctive works cast oceanic perspectives on the cultural, political and biological dimensions of the oceans, examining the effects of human-made issues, such as climate change and sea-level rise, while reimagining human and “more-than-human” relationships. The exhibition features nine newly commissioned works, many flowing from the Academy’s expeditions in the Pacific Ocean, alongside exceptional pieces from the TBA21 collection. It will be accompanied by a series of spoken word-performances every Friday on the TBA21–Ephemeropteræ stage in Augarten, co-curated by Boris Ondreička and Daniela Zyman with Stefanie Hessler and Markus Reymann, episodes from a Tidalectics radio series in collaboration with NTS Radio, as well as a comprehensive publication.

TBA21 chairwoman Francesca von Habsburg commented: “I have committed the work of TBA21 to the most pressing topics of today, not only in a descriptive fashion but by taking the language of art to concrete actions and solution finding. It’s a turning point for the foundation as it increasingly looks unashamedly at becoming an agent of change. We need to make peace with the oceans.”

The ocean covers approximately 72 percent of the earth’s surface, provides habitat for 90 percent of all life on the planet, and is responsible for every other breath we take. Yet we know more about our galaxy than this vital life support system: Tidalectics is an oceanic worldview, a different way of engaging with the oceans and the world we inhabit. Unbound by land-based modes of thinking and living, the exhibition is reflective of the rhythmic fluidity of water and the incessant swelling and receding of the tides.

Taking its title from a play on words by the celebrated Barbadian poet-historian Kamau 

Braithwaite, Tidalectics seeks to comprehend our histories as trajectories tossed by waves, from ocean crossings to systems of exchange, myths, and microbial origins. The exhibition will highlight processes of cultural adaptation and material change, presenting a rich framework for understanding the coalescing polarities of contemporaneity and history, science and poetics, routes and roots, and ourselves – mostly land-dwelling humans – with the oceans and their many and diverse inhabitants.

TBA21–Academy director Markus Reymann commented: “This exhibition bears the fruits of an experiment that Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary embarked on in 2011: an explorational voyage that has become TBA21–Academy. This has led us not only to researching the Pacific Ocean at great lengths and engaging with local communities and organizations with our extraordinary participants, but it has also led to a program and commitment that transcends the exhibition space and brings our practice to science, conservation and exploration. This exhibition is the attempt to bring all of these influences together and share this newly gained oceanview and engagement with our TBA21 audience. The opening of Tidalectics coincides with the United Nations’ very first Ocean Conference, during which, on Ocean Day (June 8) TBA21–Academy will present a performance by Laura Anderson Barbata, conceived on an expedition to Papua New Guinea.”

EPHEMEROPTERÆ

Tidalectics coincides with the start of the sixth Ephemeropteræ season, which features spoken-word performances every Friday in the TBA21–Ephemeropteræ pavilion in the Augarten, designed by David Adjaye. For the opening of Tidalectics, Manthia Diawara, Em’kal Eyongakpa and Jana Winderen will perform, while a later performance by Joan Jonas on June 23 marks a further highlight of the Ephemeropteræ program. Ephemeropteræ has been curated by Boris Ondreička and Daniela Zyman from 2012 to 2016 and is being conceived in 2017 together with Stefanie Hessler and Markus Reymann.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS AND WORKS

Searching for a logic coming from the oceans themselves, Eduardo Navarro’s newly commissioned video and sculptural work flows from a series of serendipitous constellations during the TBA21–Academy expedition to the Marquesas Islands, in the South Pacific. Navarro casts a magnified set of coins used in the I Ching – a traditional Chinese divination method – into the waters off the island of Tahuata. Here, where the idea originated, the sea itself becomes the liquid force of divinatory fate.

Alexander Lee, a participant in the same expedition in his native French Polynesia, taps into the imaginary of the desert island. Lee’s video envisions that anybody can become a co-owner of a volcanic hotspot from which the Society Islands have emerged, which, once acquired collectively, will be turned into a marine protected area.

Newell Harry charts creole and pidgin languages, alternative modes of exchange, and notions of value and currency in the Pacific. The exhibition features two of Harry’s works from the TBA21 collection: objects from the Kula Ring, a traditional system of ceremonial gift exchange, and anagrams printed on hereditary Tongan ngatu cloths.

Reminiscent of a boat, Em’kal Eyongakpa’s new commissioned installation destabilizes the floor under visitors’ feet, accompanied by a fishing net filled with personal objects by people whose lives have been affected by ocean crossings and an audio track of poetic tales and rhythmic sounds.

Darren Almond’s video A (2002) from the TBA21 collection presents an Antarctic world of infinite whites devoid of human presence, accompanied by a sound track that alternates between dreamy serenity and blood-thumping menace.

The video Iroojrilik (2016) by Julian Charrière charts meetings of the “natural” and the human-made during nuclear tests on the Bikini Atoll in an atemporal loop of life, death, and rebirth.

Atif Akin’s publication project emerges from a TBA21–Academy expedition led by Ute Meta Bauer to the Tuamotus in French Polynesia and considers the creation of new mythologies equivalent to radioactive deformations of code and matter resulting from the 193 nuclear tests that took place in this archipelago.

Ariel Guzik’s The Nereida Capsule (2015), from the TBA21 collection, is an instrument materializing an intention of encounter between humans and cetaceans free from dominion and devoid of utilitarian or scientific research interests.

Susanne M. Winterling’s installation Glistening Troubles (2016), resulting from her residency at the TBA21 Alligator Head Foundation in Jamaica, investigates dinoflagellate algae and their bioluminescence as indicators of the health of coastal waters with toxic potential.

In an installation centered on poisonous jellyfish, Tue Greenfort explores complex ecosystems and the consciousness of these aquatic organisms.

Janaína Tschäpe’s leporellos are filled with fantastical drawings that oscillate between fact and fiction, springing from marine biologist David Gruber’s accounts of deep sea creatures and extremophiles.

Smell researcher and artist Sissel Tolaas collects and synthesizes smells of Costa Rican oceanscapes currently undergoing ecological change. Her olfactory portraits evoke familiar and new motifs that may soon disappear but can be tracked with the help of the collected data. 

At a different moment each day, in sync with the tidal calendar, Jana Winderen’s hydrophone recordings from various expeditions of the TBA21–Academy transcend the exhibition in an interconnecting movement reminiscent of ebb and flow.

 
ABOUT THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA ART CONTEMPORARY
Founded in 2002 by Francesca von Habsburg in Vienna, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) represents the fourth generation of the Thyssen family’s commitment to the arts. After more than 15 years of collecting, commissioning projects, and engaged exhibition practice, TBA21 has established a highly respected collection of more than 700 contemporary artworks in the field of new media, including film, video, light, sound and mixed-media installations, sculpture, painting, photography, and performance. TBA21’s unique collection is the result of its ongoing commitment to commissioning and disseminating numerous art projects, such as multimedia installations, sound compositions, endurance performances, and contemporary architecture. This has earned it a pioneering reputation in the art world. The foundation sustains a far-reaching regional and international orientation through collaborations with other cultural partners around the world and explores modes of presentation intended to broaden the way viewers perceive and experience art. In 2015 Francesca von Habsburg decided to dedicate the foundation’s ongoing program to becoming an agent of change by focusing on the complexities and urgencies of the age of the Anthropocene, as well as today’s pressing challenges caused by climate change, with a special focus on marine ecosystems.

ABOUT TBA21–ACADEMY
TBA21–Academy is the exploratory soul of Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and an itinerant site of cultural production and transdisciplinary research. Conceived as a moving platform on the oceans, it brings together artists, researchers, and thinkers from various fields concerned with today’s most urgent ecological, social, and economic issues. Through its expeditions on sea and land, the Academy seeks to reinvent the culture of exploration in the 21st century, while inciting knowledge creation, new modes of collaboration, and the coproduction of solutions for the pressing environmental challenges of today.

In 2016, the Academy repeatedly demonstrated its strengthened stance on the international global climate change stage and saw further engagement through its work at the intersection of contemporary arts, science, conservation, and policy, not least by being granted official observer status at the UN International Seabed Authority (ISA) in July 2016. The Academy has commissioned numerous art projects, performances, symposia, and public convenings around the world, from Kochi, India, to Kingston, Jamaica. Future activities of the Academy in 2017 include events at the Ocean Conference, New York, in June; at the Nationalgalerie – Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, in October; during the COP23, Bonn, in November; and at the Centre for Contemporary Art at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, in January 2018. The Academy’s program conveys to a wide and diverse audience the complexities of the ocean’s ecosystems through poetic and inspiring narratives that defy the doom-and-gloom scenarios of mainstream media. 

ABOUT STEFANIE HESSLER
Stefanie Hessler is the curator of TBA21–Academy. Recent projects for TBA21–Academy include The Current Convening #2, co-curated with Ute Meta Bauer and Cesar Garcia in Kochi, India, and the conference Design of the Seabed, co-curated with TBA21–Academy director Markus Reymann at the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, Turkey (both 2016). Hessler is the co-founder of the art space Andquestionmark in Stockholm (with Carsten Höller). Recent curated projects include Sugar and Speed at the Museum of Modern Art in Recife, Brazil (2017); the 8th Momentum Biennial in Moss, Norway (2015); and Outside at Index with a film program at Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2014). Hessler regularly writes for art publications, such as ArtReview and Mousse Magazine, and coedits books, such Life Itself for the Moderna Museet. 

INFORMATION

ExhibitionTidalectics
June 2–November 19, 2017

Press ConferenceFriday, June 2, 2017, 10.30 am

OpeningFriday, June 2, 2017, 6.45 pm onwards

Ephemeropteræ—Performance SeriesOpening Performance

Manthia Diawara, Em’kal Eyongakpa, Jana WinderenFriday, June 2, 2017, 7.15–9.30 pm

The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw to open the Museum on the Vistula

Sulle rive della Vistula, a Varsavia, il 25 Marzo si apre uno spazio unico e flessibile per le mostra temporanea messa a disposizione dalla Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21).

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On Saturday, 25 March, a new temporary contemporary art space will open along the Vistula River in Powiśle, one of Warsaw’s most historic neighborhoods. Situated near the Copernicus Science Centre and the Warsaw University Library, the Museum on the Vistula will host exhibitions and events, providing a meeting point for all until the Museum’s new building in Plac Defilad opens in 2020.

 

Designed by renowned Austrian architect Adolf Krischanitz, the Pavilion has been made available to the Museum through a collaboration with the Vienna-based Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) foundation. Common exhibition projects are planned in the future.

 

“The fact that Adolf Krischanitz’ wonderful temporary exhibition space will become a center for contemporary art and culture in Warsaw is very exciting,” notes Francesca von Habsburg, founder and chairwoman of TBA21. “Its interim use in Powiśle will create an extraordinary, experimental space – not only inside, but outside as well – offering visitors and passers by a unique and direct experience of contemporary art.”

 

Conceived as a movable and reusable structure, the Museum on the Vistula features a 600 square-meter exhibition space, with an additional exterior area for the presentation of art, as well as an opportunity for artists to design the building’s façade. First installed in the center of Berlin at the former site of the Palace of the Republic, the Pavilion offered a provisional space for the Temporäre Kunsthalle, a temporary contemporary art installation that hosted events and exhibitions for two years between 2008 and 2010. 

 

The time restrictions for this interim exhibition space were reflected in Krischanitz’s beautifully clear and deliberate design, which emphasizes a range of possibilities for quick transformations, elasticity, and functionality. The main hall is conceived as a wooden construction with open-web girders, while the surrounding strip foundations form a stable basis for the wooden elements that emerge from them. The surfaces of the exterior skin and the inner walls are made from fiber-cement panels.

 

The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw will inaugurate the Pavilion in Powiśle with an exhibition that explores the cultural connotations and universality of Warsaw’s iconic symbol within the context of creating a modern urban identity. 

 

The Beguiling Siren Is Thy Crest features the works of national and internationally renowned artists, including Korakrit Arunanondchai, Evelyne Axell, Alex Baczyński-Jenkins, Louise Bourgeois, Bernard Buffet, Claude Cahun, Liz Craft, Edith Dekyndt, Christian Dietrich, Leo Dohmen, Drexcyia with Abdul Qadim Haqq, Elmgreen & Dragset, Leonor Fini, Ellen Gallagher, Dorota Jurczak, Birgit Jürgenssen, Tobias Kaspar, Gina Litherland, Sylvia Palacios Whitman, Pablo Picasso, Agnieszka Polska, Carol Rama, Erna Rosenstein, Tejal Shah, Penny Slinger, Juliana Snapper, Franz von Stuck, Alina Szapocznikow, Dorothea Tanning, Wolfgang Tillmans, Tunga, Anne Uddenberg, Hannah Wilke, Ming Wong, Marcelo Zammenhoff, Anna Zaradny and Artur Żmijewski.

 

Aru Kuxipa | Sacred Secret - Ernesto Neto and the Huni Kuin

TBA21–Augarten, Vienna, in collaboration with Kunsthalle Krems June 25–October 25, 2015

Opening symposium: “The Rise of the Phyto Age”

A symposium on healing, curing, traditional Amazonian medicine, and traditional European practices—on ethnobotany, cultivation, and the teaching of plants 

TBA21–Augarten, Vienna, June 26–27, 2015

Aru Kuxipa | Sacred Secret is TBA21’s latest artist-centered initiative of commissioning interdisciplinary and unconventional projects devoted to social and environmental concerns. The collaborative journey that the Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto, the Huni Kuin, and TBA21 have embarked on marks a crucial extension of the concerns that have been evident in Neto’s oeuvre over the past 20 years: a celebration of the sensuality of being, the unity of bodies and nature, and a longing for spiritual vision. Neto’s collaboration with the Huni Kuin people unfolds as an pioneering experiment, establishing a zone of encounter with our “ancestral futures” and an investigation of the teachings of plants and the spiritual nature of objects. “By co-authoring this exhibition with them in their own territory geographically and conceptually, this exhibition is attempting to draw a consensus between different creative impulses, and sensitize an audience which is increasingly interested in work that is informed by other practices. Work that lies between a fine balance of conscience and meaning is the basis of truth. This new body of work transcends the conceptual framework laid down by previous generations, and allows the art to flow into a narrative that shares its concerns to a public yearning to be further sensitized about issues that affect us all, not just in remote localities in which they were born,” says Francesca von Habsburg, founder and chairwoman of TBA21. 

With this new collaborative engagement, Neto mobilizes a deep understanding of indigenous wisdom and tradition and the relational and perspectival nature of the Huni Kuin’s world vision. Aru Kuxipa will transform TBA21–Augarten into a space of secret ritual, participation, and activation, hosting spiritual and ceremonial gatherings. At the center of the exhibition, a kupixawa, an immersive space of celebration, gathering, and contemplation, will be designed by Neto. Members of the Huni Kuin will reside in Vienna for the preparation and initiation of the exhibition and enter into dialogue with Neto’s artistic language through a diversity of knowledge, expressions, and experiences: music, sounds, drawings, weavings, rituals, herbaria, use of medical and sacred plants, “teacher plants,” and everyday objects. Ritual and magic objects collected from the Huni Kuin and from other indigenous Amazonian tribes, some on loan from Vienna’s renowned Weltmuseum, will be presented in a display fabricated from Lycra and spiced with pepper and lavender. The planned intervention will both contextualize and seek to reverse the encyclopedic (re)presentation of indigenous artifacts and the objectification of knowledge in traditional museum settings. 

Neto’s new commission, combined with earlier major works by the artist from TBA21’s collection, demonstrate his long-standing dedication to divine forms and engage with an understanding of the body as part of the spiritual and material universe. Likewise, Aru Kuxipa engages with the larger political issues driving the recognition of the rights of indigenous communities today: the importance of preserving common lands and of opposing the injustice and criminalization that indigenous communities face with respect to violated land rights and the destruction of their biodiverse habitat.

« Today we are talking about Aru Kuxipá and today we are here together with txai Ernesto Neto, who is an artist, who is with the people Huni Kuin; he is bringing this art of the nature, this contemporary art; all this together turns into a beautiful picture, into a beautiful dance, into a beautiful melody of sounds, into beautiful poetry, which is nothing more than the art that exists in each of us; but it is the courage of txai Ernesto and the courage of the Huni Kuin people joining their forces to display the beauty of nature, the beauty of culture, the beauty of art, so that people can learn more, so that we can be singing together, healing together, celebrating - it is a time for celebration ». Txaná, member of the  Huni Kuin people.

In conjunction with the Livro da Cura (Book of Healing), published in Portuguese and the Hatxa Kui language in collaboration with Editora Dantes and „initiated“ in Vienna in an English version, Aru Kuxipa engages with the large universe of indigenous knowledge, which has been sidelined and exoticized for centuries but which opens multiple entry points into a rethinking of our present moment. The Livro da Cura contains descriptions of the 109 plant species used in the indigenous therapies of the Huni Kuin and their curative properties. This ancestral knowledge and sacred spiritual philosophy are at the core of the exhibition, the international symposium, and the rituals. 

Unfolding in two institutional venues and over two continents, this collaborative exhibition engages with partners in both Austria and Brazil. While the Kunsthalle Krems focuses on a retrospective view of Neto’s nearly two decades of artistic production, TBA21 showcases the artist’s latest explorations and engagements. 

The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of symposia and educational programs at TBA21–Augarten.

Curated by Daniela Zyman

INFORMATION

Exhibition

Ernesto Neto and the Huni Kuin 

Aru Kuxipa | Sacred Secret

Curated by Daniela Zyman

Location

TBA21–Augarten, Scherzergasse 1a, 1020 Vienna, Austria

Press Conference

Thursday, June 25, 2015, 4 p.m., TBA21–Augarten, Vienna

Opening

Thursday, June 25, 2015, 7 p.m., TBA21–Augarten

International symposium—“The Rise of the Phyto Age”

TBA21–Augarten, Vienna, June 26–27, 2015

Reception by the City of Vienna

A reception hosted by Vice Mayor Maria Vassilakou in honor of the Huni Kuin

City Hall, Vienna, June 24, 2015

Opening Hours

TBA21–Augarten

Wednesday–Thursday, 12–5 p.m.; Friday–Sunday, 12–7 p.m.

Closed on Mondays and Tuesdays

Free admission

Visitor Information

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary–Augarten

T +43 1 513 98 56-24

augarten@tba21.org

www.tba21.org

www.facebook.com/tba21, www.twitter.com/tba21, instagram.com/tba_21

Supported by 

As one of the leading insurance groups in Central and Eastern Europe, the Vienna Insurance Group and its main share holder clearly perceive its social responsibilities and have been reliable sponsoring partners for Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and other cultural projects for many years. Numerous museums and galleries have insured their collections with Vienna Insurance Group. The main objective for cooperating with cultural institutions is to promote the international exchange in the field of arts and culture. Since June 2013, thanks to the main share holder of Vienna Insurance Group, admission to TBA21–Augarten has been free.

NOTE TO THE EDITORS

Livro da Cura 

Una Isi Kayawa (Livro da Cura, or “Book of Healing”), produced by the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden Research Institute (IJBRJ) and originally published by Editora Dantes in 2014 in a bilingual edition (Portuguese and Hatxa Kui languages) compiles descriptions of the 109 species used in indigenous therapies of the Huni Kuin people of the Jordão River in the state of Acre, Brazil, as well as information about the region of occurrence and forms of treatment. The work of researching and organizing the information took two and a half years and was coordinated by the botanist Alexandre Quinet of the IJBRJ. The book was conceived by the shaman Agostinho Manduca Mateus Ika Muru, who died shortly before the work was completed and produced (and drawn entirely) by the Huni Kuin people as a representation of their healing philosophies. In addition to presenting information about plants, the book uses stories and drawings to inform readers about the culture of the Huni Kuin people, such as their eating habits, their music, and their views regarding disease and spirituality. To represent the written content in Hatxa Kui, the book’s publisher, Anna Dantes, created a special typographic font inspired by the handwritten letters in indigenous notebooks. In conjunction with the exhibition, TBA21, together with Editora Dantes and Sternberg Press, is planning to publish the 260-page book in English and Hatxa Kui. 

Ernesto Neto 

Since the mid-1990s Ernesto Neto (b. 1964) has produced an influential body of work that explores constructions of social space and the natural world by inviting physical interaction and sensory experience. Drawing on biomorphism and minimalist sculpture, along with neoconcretism and other Brazilian vanguard movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the artist both references and incorporates organic shapes and materials—spices, sand, and shells among them—that engage all five senses, producing a new type of sensory perception that renegotiates boundaries between the artwork and the viewer, the organic and the man-made, as well as between the natural, spiritual, and social worlds. 

The Huni Kuin

The Huni Kuin live on the Brazilian-Peruvian border in Western Amazonia and belong to the Pano linguistic family that inhabits the tropical forest of eastern Peru, from the Andean foothills to western Brazil in the states of Acre and southern Amazonas, covering the areas of the Upper Jurug and Purus and the Javari Valley, respectively. Specifically the regions of the Jordão and  Tarauacá Rivers are the habitat of the members of the Huni Kuin who will be in residency at TBA21, Vienna.

With a population of approximately 5,964 people, they make up half of the indigenous population of Acre and are distributed for five cities corresponding to an area of 633.213 ha. Their language belongs to the linguistic family Pano, that they call Hatxa Kui (true language), whose abundance manifest also in their musical diversity.

The Huni Kuin society, traditionally, has a social organization that turns around groups of extensive families, with prominence on two figures: the leadership (cacique) and pajè (shaman). Although pajha have been one of the most persecuted figures of the indigenous societies during the process of settling of the Amazon, the Huni Kuin society still assign them a significant role in its culture in helping to maintain the connection with the spiritual realm to protect his people from harm that originates there.

The Brazilian Huni Kuin for years lived in more disperse form and became familiarized with rubber-tapper culture by working under exploitative conditions for rubber bosses over the space of two generations. Only ten-out-of-sixty tribal groups in that region survived this period. In 1951 the Huni Kuin suffered a genocide that exterminated 75-80% of the group. In the 1970s, the people began to break free from the yoke of the rubber industry. Much of their culture by that time had begun to disintegrate, but they began to organize and demand access to the land that had been set aside for them along with the right to live in traditional ways. Today the Huni Kuin are engaged in a profound process of recovering their traditions and practices of medicine, agriculture, hunting and fishing, or weaving, while having to face new pressures to protect their land rights due to ecological, political and economic pressures and land grabs. 

About TBA21 

Founded in 2002 by Francesca von Habsburg in Vienna, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) represents the fourth generation of the Thyssen family’s commitment to the arts. The foundation is dedicated primarily to the commissioning and dissemination of ambitious, experimental, and unconventional projects that defy traditional categorizations. This approach has gained the collection a pioneering reputation throughout the world. The foundation’s projects promote artistic practices that are architectural, context- and site-specific, performative, and often informed by an interest in social aesthetics and environmental concerns. Many of the projects reflect the shift to transdisciplinary practices embracing architecture, sound, music, and science.

The What If?... Scenario (after LG)

Un nuovo ed interessante progetto sostenuto da TBA21 il nuovo intervento di Cerith Wyn Evans per i dieci anni della fondazione nella sede di Augarten a Vienna.

In The What If?... Scenario (after LG), Wyn Evans literally sets the stage for a multitude of potentialities, contingencies, and uncertainties about given conditions and structures of what we see and what we know and how we come to know without ever solidifying his position into a positivist affirmation but rather remaining suspended in "weak connections". His luminous works, collected by TBA21 over 10 years and here shown together for the first time, unfold a spider web of artistic, literary, and referential signifiers, waiting to be glimpsed and grasped by a viewer who cannot but become an active performer in a play of multiple meanings and speculations. Wyn Evans’s artistic strategy interrupts our habitual access to the world of objects and meanings by disrupting our associative and (re-)cognitive patterns, locating gaps, hinting at subliminal associations, anecdotal slippages, contingencies, and errors in translation. 

Cerith Wyn Evans, however, uses almost exclusively the "already written", stages it as event, "queers it", displaces it and makes it truly contingent. Working mostly with film, light, communication technologies such as Morse code, literature, and quotations, he complicates the materiality and structural aspects of coded communication and text at the threshold of installation. Exploring and exploiting the limits of vision, the reticence of the retina, and structural cinematic experiences, he plays with the viewers’ psychophysical condition, approaching his or her sensorium in multiple audiovisual languages that are waiting to be translated, decoded, and interpreted within an open horizon of meanings without ever fully losing control of the frame of interpretations. 

In the tradition of TBA21’s first three shows at the Augarten, which operated in essentially monographic yet specifically dialogical form and understood as artistic encounters, the show presents the second iteration of Cerith Wyn Evans’s collaboration with the German artist Florian Hecker, 

No night No day (2009), first shown at the Teatro Goldoni on the occasion of the 53rd Venice Biennale. The work, a junction of two independently produced parts, can be seen as a materialization of the "third mind" as established by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin: a third space that is created through the encounter between two minds and that results in an unforeseeable and not simply additive but rather potentiated realm, an extrapolation of the two voices. No night No day will be presented for the first time in an installation version, adapted to the spatial configuration of the Augarten. 

TBA21 began collecting Wyn Evans’s work very early in the foundation’s history, resulting in a unique assembly of the artist’s oeuvre and as such an array of pointers to questions and propositions that can be posed and poised together at TBA21–Augarten. Additionally a newly commissioned large-scale abstract neon work will take its departure from representations of the collisions of high energetic particle beams in a particle accelerator superimposed with the chemical formula for LSD as discovered by Albert Hofmann. Experience, vision, and (speculative) perception introduced into notions of science, heuristics and faith, communication and illustration render an abstract geometrical figure essential for the formation and theoretization of a universal sub-atomic particle.

TBA21–Augarten

DURATION: July 5 - November 3, 2013

OPENING: Thursday, July 4, 2013, 7 pm 

Curated by Daniela Zyman

OPENING HOURS: 

Wednesday and Thursday 12—5 pm

Friday to Sunday 12—7 pm  

Closed on Mondays and Tuesdays

Opera in fotografia di Cerith Wyn Evans "Astrophotography-Stages of photographic development“ by Siegfried Marx (1987), 2007
  Chandelier (Luce Italia), flat screen monitor, computer with morse code unit and text by R. Bundell and W. J. Robert and S.N. Tritton - Photo: Jens Ziehe / TBA21, 2013  Installation view: Cerith Wyn Evans "The What If?… Scenario (after LG)", TBA21–Augarten