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19/2/2015

World of Matter

Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montreal

Exposing Resource Ecologies brings together seven works produced by World of Matter, an international art and media project investigating primary materials (fossil, mineral, agrarian, maritime) and the complex ecologies in which they are embedded. Initiated by an interdisciplinary group of visual practitioners and theorists, World of Matter responds to the urgent need for new forms of representation that shift resource-related debates from a market driven domain to open platforms for engaged public discourse.

“World of Matter considers a planetary perspective on a world that matters.”

World of Matter’s method of working and of gathering, sharing and debating knowledge is driven by a desire to build an expanded public commons, and as such constitutes an engaged social practice. The group’s thrust is global in scope, and is particularly sensitive to inequalities between and within areas of the global South, the exacerbation of poverty and the pervasiveness of corporate exploitation of labour and resources around the world. Critical of a human-centered approach to resource extraction, the World of Matter projects are informed and shaped by a broad field of actors (human and non-human), and by diverse disciplines and cultural filiations. The urgent need to foster debate in the transnational public arena – debate that opens the possibility for different modes of social organization, – has led the various practitioners to embrace an open-access approach in their online platform, to valorize visual material as a tool for building agency, and to diversify their mode of exchange by “acting” through exhibitions, symposia, texts and other public events.

Ten collaborators have developed visual projects that are the result of long-term investigative fieldwork of the interconnected extractive ecologies at play in particular sites around the world, as well as their multifaceted impact on human and non-human lives and systems. Videos, interviews, testimonies and narratives, documents, maps and texts are configured as installations in the gallery space and form a complex interaction of critical documentary analysis and speculations addressing our relationship to (and definitions of) nature.

By placing the result of their research and collaborations within an exhibitionary framework, World of Matter engages with questions of display, aesthetic consideration, artistic experience, and art world reception – all areas that have been an underlying and open-ended object of inquiry for the gallery. The documentary nature of their work, the volume of information and its manner of presentation require an extensive investment from the visitor. Their work resists standard forms of accelerated artwork consumption, and opens up the field of the visual, of the exhibited, to a reflexive engagement with complex subject matter.

With the support of the Austrian Cultural Forum, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen and the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia

This exhibition is part of the Montreal Digital Spring 2015.

Symposium
February 20 – 21
World of Matter: Extractive Ecologies and Unceded Terrains

Co-organized by Krista Lynes (Canada Research Chair in Feminist Media Studies, Associate Professor in Communication Studies, Concordia University) and Darin Barney (Canada Research Chair in Technology & Citizenship, Associate Professor in Communication Studies, McGill University)

Panelists:
Darin Barney, Mabe Bethônico, Ursula Biemann, Amanda Boetzkes, Nicholas Brown, Heather Davis, Alain Deneault, Adam Dickinson, Eduardo Kohn, Brenda Longfellow, Helge Mooshammer, Scott Morgensen, Peter Mortenböck, Shirley Roburn, Rafico Ruiz, Emily Scott, Audra Simpson, Nicole Starosielski, Imre Szeman, Zoe Todd, Gisèle Trudel, Lonnie van Brummelen, Peter von Tiesenhauen

Location:
Concordia University
EV 7.735,
1515 St-Catherine St. W.

This symposium asks how the fields of contemporary art and media studies, indigenous studies and resistance movements, critical environmental studies, new ethnography and science and technology studies might bring into focus the globalizing dynamics of extractive ecologies. It seeks to build substantive discursive grounds for resisting incursions into sovereign land, denials of the rights of nature, and the persistent dispossession of indigenous and First Nation peoples. It asks, What unceded terrains precede and interrupt the excavatory depths of imperial ecologies? What interventions ensure the defense of land, labour, survival and species diversity in the globalized present?

Image: Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer, A World of Matter, 2014. Wall map, collection of archival documents, texts, photographs, video. Courtesy of the artists

Press Contact:
Jean-Louis René, jean-louis.rene@concordia.ca

Opening: Friday, February 20, 6–8pm

Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery
Concordia University
1400, boul. de Maisonneuve West
Montreal (Québec) Canada
H3G 1M8

Opening Hours
Tuesday to Friday: noon to 6 pm. Saturday: noon to 5 pm.
The Gallery is closed on statutory holidays and during the months of July and August

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