Opening: Wednesday, September 4, 6–9pm
Exhibition: September 5–November 14, 2019
Public Program: Tuesday, October 1, 6:30pm
Caitlin Berrigan & Laurel Ptak in conversation
Location & Hours
Art in General
145 Plymouth Street (Map)
Dumbo, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Tuesday–Saturday, 12–6pm
Artist and ACT alumna Caitlin Berrigan (SMVisS ’09) will have her first solo exhibition in New York as part of Art in General’s New Commissions Program from September 5–November 14, 2019, curated by Laurel Ptak. In our urgent era of climate crisis, her work investigates how deep time and interspecies communication might assist us in radical planetary transformation. A multimedia installation comprised of video, sculpture and communication instruments, Imaginary Explosions explores what other presents and futures become possible once we begin to think beyond the framework of the human.
At the center of the exhibition are two episodic, science fiction videos that follow an affiliation of transfeminist scientists operating in communication with the desires of the mineral earth to simultaneously erupt all volcanoes. As they traverse geological sites across place and time, they attempt to divest technoscientific instruments of their military and corporate power, in order to re-embody them towards alternative cosmologies. Co-conspiring with the videos’ characters—who are artists and scholars whose real-life work pushes the very limits of science and culture—Berrigan presents Imaginary Explosions an an act of mutual alliance, climate reparation and cosmology creation.
Trained at MIT, the artist’s practice has long questioned how technoscientific tools can be re-inhabited by collective imagination as well as queer and decolonial paradigms that emphasize the value of embodied forms of knowledge. Because such technologies remain necessary for us to respond effectively to massive ecosystem change, Berrigan insists that better grasping how these information systems influence, build and shape our world may ultimately allow us to inhabit it differently.
Caitlin Berrigan works across performance, video, sculpture and text to engage with the intimate and embodied dimensions of power, politics and capitalism. Her artist’s book Imaginary Explosions was published by Broken Dimanche Press in 2018 and her book Unfinished State is forthcoming from Archive Books with support from the Graham Foundation. Her work has been shown at the Whitney Museum, the Poetry Project, Harvard Carpenter Center, Storefront for Art & Architecture, Hammer Museum, Anthology Film Archives, LACMA, Henry Art Gallery, UnionDocs and the deCordova Museum, among others. Berrigan has received grants and residencies from the Humboldt Foundation, Skowhegan, Graham Foundation, PROGRAM for Art & Architecture Berlin and Akademie Schloss Solitude. She holds a Master’s in visual art from MIT and a B.A. from Hampshire College. She is a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and a research affiliate of the NYU Tandon School of Engineering Technology, Culture and Society.
This project was also supported, in part, by the Centre for Geohumanities, Royal Holloway University, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Henry Art Gallery, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and the Wassaic Project.
The artist wishes to thank: Nina Bozicnik, Susan Lewandowski, Sasha Engelmann, Harriet Hawkins, Yun Ingrid Lee, Nicole L’Huillier, Karen Holmberg, Brent Alloway, Andres Burbano, Constanza Gomez (ProCultura), Javiera Letelier, Rae Parnell, Sindhu Thirumalaisamy, Luke DuBois, Marika Litz, Julia Murray, Sebastian Morales, Lily Fang, Harry Sanderson, Sharlene Bamboat, Renate Lorenz, NYU LaGuardia Studio, Laurel Ptak, Yonatan Katzelnik, AD Cantor, Mika Lee, Marina Ruojia Yang, Lilian Yeling Yang and Art in General’s Board of Directors.
