NATURALCULTURAL NIGHTS III
Earthly Bodies of Then, Now & When

NATURALCULTURAL NIGHTS​

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Earthly Bodies of Then, Now & When

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The current proposed ‘anthropocene’ welcomes a critical reexamination of what it means to be ‘human’: the overhauling of the Vitruvian Man, an ideal present in Western thought and visual culture since the fifteenth century, now contentested by new modes of humanist, anti-humanist and post-humanist schools of thought.

 

BWG Gallery's 20-artist group exhibition Earthly Bodies of Then, Now & When takes as its inspiration the abundance of emerging definitions of human. These definitions forgo an anthropocentric view in profound search of expanded possibilities for subjects and species. Curated across two spaces, the exhibition literally and abstractly navigates a primeval, archaic past of ‘Then’ and a Post-human future ‘When’, occupied by earthly bodies that are at once reminiscent and unfamiliar. These hybrid beings are, amongst other things — romantic and elemental, surreal and biomorphic, cyborgian and transhuman: inhabitants of real and fictitious landscapes. Visitors are encouraged to contemplate these as visual itineraries of the multiplicity inherent in the ‘human’, echoing Rosi Braidotti’s assertation that ‘None of us can say with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that 1’.

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1 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013)

 

Anna Moss - Art Historian | Writer | Curator

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