About the exhibition
“Our time is perhaps the time of an epidemic of things.” (Tristan Garcia, Form and Object: A Treatise on Things, 2011)
Contemporary objects and artifacts orbit our planet around one another densely. Commodities, digital technologies and catastrophes are driven by a global capital machine as heavenly bodies. Occurring and circulating daily in our universe, they collide with us over and over again. Blending contexts from microcosmic nanometer to macroscopic universe, the exhibition From Object to Cosmos depicts a cosmology where things coexist in our capital-media world.
The Chinese title of exhibition “O-B-Jet” is taken from the transliteration of “object” which borrowed its original context of surrealism referring to those specific objects withdrawn and split from reality through automatism, unconsciousness, mimicry and mysticism. The theory of tool-being from object to artifact, the dialectic between non-correlational existence and relational network, the fictional world, and the finitude of epistemology, among other concerns of contemporary speculative philosophy make up the exhibition’s agenda. By looking at those objective yet unattainable things in the vicinity, allowing them to draw out from the domain where they belong to, it probes the imagination of how objects could be acknowledged and acted.
From Object to Cosmos brings together two speculative principles: The state of existence of the thing itself or thing-in-itself; and the scale of the object that is connected to the "globe", today's largest artifact. Shifting from anthropocentric consciousness toward the things beyond understanding to glance at our subsistence, this giant living planet is a spherical “global object” — the earth, the dynamics of itself and all the relational circles. The exhibition follows the narration about lives, non-human beings, medium and technology. Through things, the imagination reconstructs our relationships, internal and external.
As an object-oriented odyssey, From Object to Cosmos is a poetic assembly of things rather than an artistic display. Included are wafers, minerals, clones, owls, the Puerto Rican amazon, Paraná pine, cameras, still lives of everyday dining, emails, the Eiffel Tower, binoculars, the Arecibo Observatory, constellations, monoliths and a near future city. All those seemly-irrelevant things are formed into a “flat” world. Entering through visual and technical objects, the inner speculative universe of “OBJET” where the audience becomes a member of this object jungle resonating, trapping, rejecting, retreating, merging, and proliferating with each other.
Revisiting the collection of the Kaohsiung Museum of Arts, From Object to Cosmos also invites artists’ works based on the associated themes forming new dialogues and interpretations of its different contexts. Focusing on the divergent environment that is shaped by simulacra, technology and the human world, and the material trajectory and media network behind our livelihood, the exhibition unveils a new consciousness and rethinks the connection between human and non-human, biological and non-biological, authentic and virtual things.
Superviser | Bureau of Cultural Affairs Kaohsiung City Government
Organizer | Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts
Appointed Deformaldehyde Coating Sponsor | HOPAX
Appointed Art Transportation | Crown Van Lines Co., LTD
Artists｜
Wang Yahui
Yu Cheng-Ta
Ayoung Kim
Wu Chi-Yu
Su-Chen Hung
Musquiqui Chihying
Yuan Goang-Ming
Chen Ching-Yuan
Tao Ya-Lun
Tsui Kuang-Yu
Chang Teng-Yuan
Hsu Su-Chen
Chang Kuang-Ho
Jun Yang
So Yo Hen
Su Hui-Yu
Allora & Calzadilla, Ted Chiang
Curator｜
Fang Yen Hsiang
