Mar 19, 2018
Karsten Lund is Assistant Curator at The Renaissance Society with recent curated exhibitions including Ben Rivers em>Urth and Sadie Benning's Shared Eye. Previously, Lund was Curatorial Assistant at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, contributing to major group exhibitions including The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology and The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now.Additionally, he has produced curatorial projects at other venues, including the Museum of Contemporary Photography, New Capital Projects, Hyde Park Art Center, and a factory shortly before its demolition.
UNTHOUGHT ENVIRONMENTS
Start with the ancient elements—earth, water, fire, air—and then expand your view of our elemental world. Think about sunlight, weather systems, rare earth minerals, and electromagnetic forces, to name only a few other things. Phenomena like these are integral to our daily lives but they can be elusive, easily forgotten, or deliberately kept out of sight: the hidden components of our virtual worlds, factors in geopolitics, or deeper influences on human habits and cultures. What are our “unthought environments” today? Our elemental surroundings become another kind of vital infrastructure, seemingly there to be used and overlooked, but the elements have shaped us, too, and sometimes they veer into the foreground.
Unthought Environments is informed by evolving discussions in various fields, including media studies, ecology, and philosophy. Against this backdrop, new and recent artworks offer a set of explorations with different focal points in the elemental sphere as it intersects with our more human-made domains. The artists’ videos, sculptures, photographs, installations, and digital images delve into the state of water in multiple countries; the mining operations that feed our computers; the effects of the sun; electromagnetic fields made visible; dust storms; and other phenomena brought to life.
Curated by Karsten Lund.