WELCOME TO THE ANTHROPOCENE
Welcome to the Anthropocene
December 7th 2017 – February 10th 2018
IMAS Mawson exhibition space, IMAS Reception and IMAS Wet Laboratories, 20 Castray Esplanade, Battery Point, Hobart, Tasmania.
Opening December 7th at 5.30pm
Performances by Pony Express and Ken + Julia Yonetani
‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’ is an art/science collaboration between Constance ARI, The Centre for Marine Socioecology (CMS), The Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) and The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Hobart, Tasmania.
Five experimental artists have been working with leading scientists to explore themes related to our changing planet:
Pony Express with Professor Beth Fulton and Team:
Tentaculum by Pony Express is a visual and performative response to the Wet Laboratory at The Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies combining video, group choreography, octopus led improvisation, scientific observation and personal lubricants. Pony Express occupy the existing audio-visual interface at IMAS, remodelling the lab to be global weirding ready. Regarding the lab itself as an ecosystem, this work queers the scientific processes and actions that takes place within.
Inspired by Tentacular thinking, a term used by Donna Haraway in her latest book “Staying With The Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene’ and CSIRO’s ecosystem model ‘Atlantis’, Tentaculum will open with a durational performance in which eight humans attempt to embody the intellectual and sensory world of a cephalopod, in an adaptive embrace of the impending Chthulucene.
helloponyexpress.com/
Ken + Julia Yonetani with Assoc. Professor Julia Blanchard and team:
The “Web of Life” and “Rewiring”, an artwork and interactive performance.
The complex webs of life-systems on earth are in a non-static network that is continually regenerating and adapting and therefore is not in equilibrium but may nonetheless be stable, until it isn’t.
In their artwork, “Web of Life”, Ken + Julia have used over 6000 meters of fishing wire to create a site-specific installation. The wire is both a metaphor for our seemingly insatiable appetite for fish, and for the hidden interconnection between things. Under UV light, the fishing wire suddenly reveals a complex web of intertwining lines, which the viewer, as a part of and a participant in these systems, is invited to both cut and try to “rewire”.
kenandjuliayonetani.com/
Selena de Carvalho with Dr. Alistair Hobday and team:
Selena de Carvalho’s work for Welcome to the Anthropocene reaches back through deep time and asks the audience to momentarily pause, to come in close and listen to the soft siren of an Icelandic glacier melting. A micro recording of a mutable element, a solid form transitioning, after several thousand years back into to a liquid state. This sound recording emanates from within a King Billy Pine listening device and draws focus on the use, and transformation of materials that both pre-date the contested epoch of the Anthropocene.
selenadecarvalho.com
‘This project was made possible by the Australian Government’s Regional Arts Fund, which supports the arts in regional and remote Australia. Welcome to the Anthropocene also received generous support and assistance from The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), The Centre for Marine Socioecology (CMS), The Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS), The Creative Exchange Institute at the University of Tasmania (CXI) and through Arts Tasmania by the Minister for the Arts.’