Current exhibitions

Multispecies Storytelling
January 23 – March 10, 2019
Dance for plants, Karin Bolender Hart, Katja Aglert, Signe Johannessen, Kristina Lindström och Åsa Ståhl

Multispecies Storytelling
January 23 – March 10, 2019
Dance for plants, Karin Bolender Hart, Katja Aglert, Signe Johannessen, Kristina Lindström och Åsa Ståhl

Vernissage

Welcome to the opening of the exhibition Multispecies Storytelling with the keynote address Kultivating "m<Other Tongues" by the artist Karin Bolender Hart at 18.30. Afterwards, there will be an opening ceremony with the artist collective dance for plants and performative catering "Feed From Soil" by Nadja Okruhlicová and Una Hallgrímsdóttir + fellow students from Design + Change, Linneaus University.

About the exhibition

From the production animals of the meat and dairy industry to the insects pollinating ‘our’ plants; from beloved pets to the microbes inhabiting our guts - everywhere animals, insects, plants and bacteria are actively re/shaping lively and life-giving worlds.

From this perspective, (how) can humans instigate and participate in the communicative processes and, indeed, entirely meaningful conversations taking place in an abundance of different registers across a wide range of species? What other stories are to be told from within those murky and many-tongued chatters of multispecies collectives? Could we, perhaps, here find alternate stories to the one main story about Man-the-Ruler-and-Destroyer which we all know so well? Could these stories teach us how to be human otherwise? And how do we stay with and cultivate such stories, knowing that they are as full of death and control as they are of crucial care and becoming?

The exhibition Multispecies Storytelling investigates playful and problematic practices of planetary hope and interspecies care in and through experimental contemporary (eco)aesthetics. The exhibition critically examines various ways of ‘reading’ worlds, and suggests new narrative forms in collaboration with horses, plants, bacteria and slugs, amongst others. The exhibition situates itself as artistic research in-the-making, and follows an open and soft form, growing and metamorphosing during the exhibition period in direct conversation with the public of Växjö and beyond.

During the exhibition, the artists will host public reading circles, workshops, choir practices, plant-sitting, rituals and interdisciplinary conversations. The exhibition will see the construction of tentative homes for precarious forms of life, sow healing plants and cultivate modest hope for multispecies futures.

Multispecies Storytelling is a curatorial collaboration between Växjö konsthall, Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, and is generously supported by the Seedbox, Linneaus University, Vetenskapsrådet and Malmö university.