Haus der Kulturen der Welt:
The Shape of a Practice: The Current

UPDATE: Building currently closed due to Covid-19; visit online

26 Oct–30 Nov 2020; Daily except Tue 12 noon–8 pm
Special opening hours during events until Sat, 31 Oct 2020
Free admission

The Shape of a Practice (26 October-30 November 2020) is the third event in HKW’s Anthropocene Curriculum, which has been ongoing since 2013.

The Current is a non-virtual exhibition that is an integrated component of The Shape of a Practice.

Timeslips [click to watch the trailer on Vimeo] and its counterpart Fourteen Slices of Time together create a poetic frame for considering the state of mind of an interplanetary agronomist—a lens for interrogating the ethics of terraforming and biosphere transformation at planetary scales. While originally inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, both works call for discussion beyond the realm of speculative/science fiction: at Neumayer-Station III in the Antarctic, German researchers are already exploring techniques to grow vegetables in space. Humans have intervened with the earth for millennia, with varying degrees of unintended consequences. But confronted by the hyperobject of the climate crisis, we find ourselves in the midst of an overdue debate about if, when and how we must alter the environment—
and how much is too much?

The contents of our installation at HKW will also be available online at shape.anthropocene-curriculum.org.

Fourteen Slices of Time

2020

installation: fourteen A6 double-sided postcards, wooden stand, black
plastic Gibraltar Patriot mailbox; dimensions 45 x 25 x 50 cm
(click on thumbnail to expand view)

Fourteen Slices of Time

Postcard 05, front and back (click on thumbnail to expand view)

Fourteen Slices of Time

Postcard 10, front and back (click on thumbnail to expand view)

The Current
Mississippi: An Anthropocene River

The exacerbation of social, ecological and political lines of conflict in the United States reveal conflicts that have been concentrating around the Mississippi for some time. As tensions rise around racialized violence, ecological destruction and the Covid-19 pandemic, the historical path dependencies and social-political structures that made them become ever more apparent.

The Current presents field studies by artists, scholars and activists who were involved in the HKW project Mississippi: An Anthropocene River and which sought site-specific approaches to planetary crises along the Mississippi River Basin; a river system that exemplifies current transformations of intertwining histories of earth and settlement, of the bio- and technosphere. The Current presents interdisciplinary research, methodological experiments and works of art that explore the ecological, political, social and technospheric interconnections of the Mississippi River. In the face of the deepening of old and new social divisions, the installation brings together projects that explore new perspectives and spheres of engagement based on solidarity and collaboration for a polyphonic practice of working, living, and surviving in the Anthropocene.

The Current: Contributions by Kayla Anderson, Sara Black, Jeremy Bolen, Isabelle Carbonell, Andrea Carlson, Jennifer Colten, Tia-Simone Gardner, Beate Geissler, Amber Ginsberg, Ryan Griffis, Monica Moses Haller, Derek Hoeferlin, Brian Holmes, Sarah Kanouse, John Kim, Brian Kirkbride, Sarah Lewison, localStyle (Marlena Novak and Jay Alan Yim) with Joslyn Willauer, Saundi McClain-Kloeckener, Margarida Mendes, Abbéy Odunlami, Lynn Peemoeller, Claire Pentecost, Oliver Sann, Jenny Schmid, Michael Swierz, Joe Underhill, Monique Verdin, Anna Van Voorhis, Maureen Walrath, Andrew S. Yang.