Whereas the well being of the Ocean is indispensable to our shared planetary wellbeing, additionally it is integral to the local weather disaster. The indiscriminate exploitation, noise, and chemical air pollution of the Ocean, their current conditions, and people on the horizon—such because the ambition of large-scale seabed mining—have unimaginable implications for his or her deterioration and our future as a species.

To acknowledge the Ocean as liquid intelligence implies opening our creativeness and our capability to admire the complexity of its ecosystems, to really feel it as a physique that not solely transports oxygen and makes life doable however has its personal intelligence and company, and whose rights should be revered. Chus Martinez, curator of the exhibition, states: “One of many nice dichotomies constructed into our tradition is a mind-set that prioritizes strong matter and sees fluids and liquid life as secondary. Understanding the Ocean as liquid intelligence not solely permits us to look after it and find it irresistible, but additionally requires that we settle for it as an entity with company and the capability to resolve and suggest futures from its personal perspective.”

The exhibition departs from the idea of synthetic intelligence, so prevalent right this moment, and suggests specializing in a extra exact and inclusive one: conductive intelligence. This time period conceives of intelligence as a drive that connects life, expertise, and information manufacturing. A capability that, utilizing creativeness and fantasy, territories that artists have at all times explored, permits us to challenge a number of doable futures based mostly on the coexistence of all species.

The exhibition “Liquid Intelligence” presents creative proposals using varied languages that convey us nearer to the Ocean and their aquatic ecosystems, producing immersive experiences. The plush expressiveness of the works in addition to the big selection of actions to be held along with the exhibition, have one purpose: to immerse us within the substance of notion to know and comprehend liquid intelligence.

This group exhibition options works by eight artists that transport guests to aquatic landscapes, and envelope us in tides and currents. 

The commissions within the exhibition exemplify a basic manner of working for TBA21: Creative analysis and investigation, following questions by way of the creation of artworks, can translate details and information into an experience-oriented understanding that’s key to opening these points to broad audiences and to foster our societies’ rising understanding of the complexity of the local weather emergency and its penalties. These works are essential for elevating consciousness concerning the planet’s local weather transformation and its penalties. Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s work, Pájaro, cómeme (2023), centered on the Caribbean, and Sonia Levy’s work, We Marry You, O Sea, as a Signal of True and Perpetual Dominion (2023), which research Venice and its lagoon, exemplify creative practices that incorporate analysis and the evaluation of particular case research.

The works from the TBA21 Assortment embrace items by artists akin to Ana Mendieta and Jumana Manna. Each artists share an curiosity in sensing past what we’re acutely aware about; sensing with a forest within the case of Mendieta or feeling with all of the supplies we extract from the earth to construct our cities, as does the Palestinian artist Jumana Manna.

The works produced in situ embrace new items such because the video set up Ziggy and the Starfish (2016-2022) by Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Entanglements sequence (2023) by Inês Zenha, in addition to Saelia Aparicio’s Our bodies of water (2023). Jordan’s work creates immersive conditions the place the altering depth of the water’s blue shade turns into code. She displays on the willful ignorance, the “synthetic stupidity” predominant in our species relating to the liquid, conductive, and natural intelligence of the Ocean. Playful and empathetic, it connects with the widespread custom in Asian cultures of understanding pure intelligence from the subatomic lifetime of larvae, viruses, micro organism, bugs, and animals, that are usually denigrated within the evolutionary pyramids created within the West, first by faith, and later strengthened by the theories of Charles Darwin.

Faith and mysticism in Victorian instances are beginning factors for Aparicio to recreate historic makes an attempt to enter the water, to vary form and develop into hybrid beings, a species-of-species, to succeed in non-binary targets by way of the creation of a symbolic language and an immersive expertise with magical parts.

Lastly, Zenha’s work creates a symbolic language of the significance of being water, of understanding the relations of an all-enveloping oceanic intelligence, creating the potential for a brand new expressive, affective, fertile imaginary, oriented towards a pedagogy of coexistence. Just like the symbolist poets, Zenha’s work locations confidence in creativeness and fantasy however, not like in symbolism, she doesn’t affiliate these colleges solely with people, but additionally with water.

Along with showcasing the artists’ work and analysis, the exhibition will develop into an area the place they, accompanied by scientists and thinkers, will suggest their approaches to aquatic life within the type of performances, encounters, and conversations. “Liquid Intelligence” will probably be a spot for studying and dialogue, ranging from creative and scientific views, and imagining a spot the place our senses function in another way and understand the multiplicity of present life kinds. A spot the place all types of life and their intelligences coexist with out resorting to hierarchies, violence, or destruction.

“Liquid Intelligence” will mark the beginning of a sequence of initiatives run by the Basis that can happen on the museum with the purpose of understanding and debating on the totally different matters that the exhibition proposes in relation to the information and look after the Ocean.

TBA21 strives to make seen the necessity for the preservation of the Ocean as a collective and shared public accountability and to create, by way of creative and scientific initiatives, a group of care and concern for the Ocean. By elevating consciousness for the broader issues of environmental injustice we’re inserting an intention to intensify collective sensitivity to the modifications in our fast environments. To discover the interplay between artwork and science and reply to the assumption in artwork and tradition as autos for social and environmental transformation, is the idea from which all TBA21 actions are carried out.

Curated by
Chus Martínez with Soledad Gutiérrez and María Montero

Collaborating artists: Saelia Aparicio, Lucas Arruda, Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Sonia Levy, Jumana Manna, Ana Mendieta, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz and Inês Zenha.

at Thyssen-Bornemisza Nationwide Museum, Madrid
till January 28, 2024