Radical Curiosity

Dear friends,

Earlier this year, whilst trying to comprehend the scale of the pandemic as it began to accelerate, everything seemed so impossibly large, immutable and intangible: the rising figures, the global spread, the eerie silence of the streets and skies.

Three months on, in the light of the present moment, this eighth edition of our Fortnightly Highlight looks back at The Showroom's archive of exhibitions, research and events with a tone of radical curiosity informed and inspired by the collaborative work and writing of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. We are currently having perhaps some of the largest conversations we’ve ever had about the future of our species, requiring from us broader and deeper planetary thinking. The following selection of projects seeks to spark curiosity and imagination; and to open up new perspectives, new alternatives and new realities.

Specially available for the next two weeks is a magisterial audio-essay by the late Mark Fisher and Justin Barton which evokes a walk undertaken along the Suffolk coastline in 2006, from Felixstowe container port to the Anglo-Saxon burial ground at Sutton Hoo. In this twenty-two minute audio fragment of On Vanishing Land (2013, 45 minutes) shadowy incursions, dream-like states, the unknown and deep time form an epic work of narrative fact and fiction.

We invite you to read Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh’s introduction to their co-edited issue of Third Text, The Wretched Earth – Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions; and to listen to a conversation held together with Elvira Dyangani Ose on the night of its launch at The Showroom in 2018. Also available to listen to again is Timothy Morton and Federico Campagna’s 2017 discussion about potential approaches to a redefinition of ecological thinking through ideas of Dark Ecology and magic. Finally, we revisit Christina Mackie’s 1999 exhibition IIP (Intron Image Project), asking how urgent questions around genetic modification posed by Mackie continue to resonate today.

Through these projects we invite you to dream; to continue to ask questions; and to remain radically curious.

Take care,

Elliot Anderson
ArtQuest Widening Participation Projects & Communications Intern, The Showroom

and

Lily Hall
Assistant Curator, The Showroom

Image: Mark Fisher and Justin Barton, documentation of production of On Vanishing Land, 2013. Exhibition jointly commissioned and produced by The Showroom and The Otolith Collective. Photo: Mark Fisher. Courtesy the artists.