Entanglements in Time, Installation view 2021. Photography by Rosie Taylor — *Entanglements in Time*, Installation view 2021. Photography by Rosie Taylor

Entanglements in Time is an exhibition at Lewisham Arthouse in London from 6-15 August 2021, showcasing UK-based artists Bart Hajduk, Jasmin Märker, Kristina Pulejkova, Margo Trushina, Solveig Settemsdal and Yambe Tam. Exhibited together for the first time, the works of these artists challenge anthropocentric markers of temporality by examining timelines that stretch far beyond the duration of human existence. On the show’s last days, co-curators Kristine Tan and Mariana Lemos came together to discuss the project.

ML: How did this project begin for you?

KT: Like many people making art and curating at this current moment in time, I am concerned about the existential threat of climate change. I wanted to address this concern from a bird's-eye view and question anthropocentric ideas of time and the world.

In his lecture ‘Being Ecological’ (2018), the philosopher Timothy Morton talks about the scenario of turning a car ignition key – how it is statistically meaningless but at the same time connected to billions of other key-turnings in this massively distributed entity called the human species. This example was resonant: it evoked the helplessness of being part of a highly impactful superorganism whose individual actions have little statistical meaning. Humans are both the direct cause of the climate crisis and also entirely irrelevant in terms of the planetary level of Earth’s deep time. It is difficult to appreciate the vast scale of climate change despite its many, obvious manifestations, such as floods, heatwaves and forest fires.

ML: Timothy Morton’s concept of ‘hyperobjects’ delineates the human inability to conceive of an object so much bigger than ourselves in space and time. However, it can also be used to absolve the apathy or the lack of responsibility among governments and corporations.

KT: Focusing on the individual’s responsibility for climate change is a trick that deflects governmental and corporate accountability. Take plastic. ‘Reduce Reuse and Recycle’ is bullshit because over 90% of plastic isn’t recycled and much of it is shipped to third world countries for processing and ends up as pollution. Of course, we need to change our consumerist behaviour but it is much more important to bring about systemic change at the governmental and global level.

ML: Such complacency is hard to comprehend. Just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions. Regarding policy-making, it feels like governments are just kicking the can down the road.

KT: The medieval idea of “cathedral thinking” stresses long-term planning that reaches far into the future. However, our modern (democratic) political systems and economic structures are built with short-term objectives in mind. Political parties are focused on winning votes in a four or five-year cycle, not the future of the planet.

ML: You caught COVID-19 early on, in the first wave in March 2020, when there was a lot of initial hype and panic. How was that?

KT: I contracted COVID-19 in London but you couldn’t get tested for it at that time. I flew back to Singapore, tested positive and was forced to self-isolate in a hotel for 45 days until the virus left my body. In the beginning, I obsessed over every new bit of information about Covid-19, such as the daily death toll and its impact on society. Like many others in lockdown, we watched the situation unfold through the computer screen or other people's cameras. During my own extended quarantine, I started emailing artists to involve them in Entanglements in Time.

ML: Sometimes in curatorial projects, a single artwork can bring together scattered thoughts and ideas. Did this happen for you?

KT: Yes, for me it was Kristina Pulejkova’s video essay TOUCHSCREEN (2020), which captures the feeling of being reduced to our respective lockdown bubbles and online worlds with the zooming in and out on the computer screen with our mouse. In the video, Pulejkova references works of art such as The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein ‘the Younger’ to illustrate the shifts in observation, perspective and multiple dimensions of viewing. It became a very important part of the exhibition as a way to think about time.

Kristina Pulejkova, TOUCHSCREEN, 2020, Installation view, 2021. Photography by Rosie Taylor — Kristina Pulejkova, *TOUCHSCREEN*, 2020, Installation view, 2021. Photography by Rosie Taylor

I was also reading an old interview with feminist theorist Karen Barad titled Intra-active Entanglements (2012). According to Barad, the universe consists of ‘intra-acting agencies’ that ‘configure and reconfigure relations of space, time, matter and meaning’. It is curious to think that Covid-19 is not just a virus but also a phenomenon that inhabits all these different ‘intra-actions’ between humans and nonhumans. It extends beyond the virus itself as people who don’t contract Covid-19 are also affected by the pandemic. It is a testament to the entanglements of life that cannot be reduced to a simple case of cause and effect. In this more complex configuration, no single agent acts autonomously. The exhibition speaks to this complexity by providing different vantage points from which to view ecological relationships.

ML: The idea of entanglements is key to the exhibition. There is a sense of life forms operating at different timescales or as part of different historical periods and yet also being entangled in each other.

KT: It was an intentional decision to include artists who work with different mediums. The various forms on display - virtual reality, drawing, sculpture and video works – allow the visitor to experience the exhibition in different ways. I also wanted to play with physical scale and the idea of contrasting timelines. From a distance, many of the works look abstract, but up close you notice how detailed and specific they are. Like Pulejkova’ video, I wanted the visitor to have the impression of zooming in and out of different times.

In Yambe Tam’s virtual/mixed reality experience 7100𝘈𝘋: 𝘈𝘪𝘳 (2021), the visitor experiences a post-anthropocene world as a bee navigating the future British isles. Humans are extinct but have left their mark on the genetically and materially altered environment. Embodying a bee, you derive pleasure from feeding on flowers that diversify and multiply as you pollinate them.

The visitor goes from being a bee in Yambe Tam’s work to navigating Margo Trushina and Solveig Settemsdal’s very material sculptures, inspecting Bart Hajduk’s detailed drawings, contemplating Jasmin Märker’s dramatic silk hanging and watching Kristina Pulejkova’s full-HD video essay. There are many ways to engage with the exhibition.

ML: What are the unifying aspects of the works?

KT: All the works acknowledge the shortcomings of the anthropocentric frame of reference in different ways. They place human existence in the larger context of geological and biological timelines and refuse the binaries that have structured Western thought such as self/other, human/animal and mind/body in favour of materiality, affectivity and multispecies stories.

For example, Solveig Settemsdal’s Tail (2018) references Italian author Italo Calvino, whose short story Blood, Sea (1967) mentions the discovery that human blood has the same pH as seawater. Tail is an inflated silicone cast of a Hylaeosaurus dinosaur model’s tail which is currently in Crystal Palace Park. The Tail is constantly refilled with air and speaks to the recycling of elements connected to living bodies and planetary ecologies in deep time.

ML: I like how Settemsdal’s work addresses the idea of time in an almost humorous way. The Victorians constructed the dinosaur model according to bone fragments and based on an idea of what they thought dinosaurs looked like, which we now know is different. She draws attention to how our imagination fills the voids of our understanding of the past. This contrasts with the futuristic aesthetics of the aluminium duct and the translucency of the dinosaur skin. It’s like an exercise in time travel – back and forth between histories.

Solveig Settemsdal, Tail, 2018, Installation view detail, 2021. Photography by Rosie Taylor — Solveig Settemsdal, *Tail*, 2018, Installation view detail, 2021. Photography by Rosie Taylor

KT: There is a similar experience of collapsing timelines in her other work, Screen, which, at first glance, resembles fossil-rich slabs of portland roach stone. However, on closer inspection, you notice the cavities are left by imprints of plastic toy dinosaur parts. If geologists from a future civilisation examined our impact on the planet in the same way we study the age of dinosaurs, they would observe the indexical traces of fossilised plastics.

ML: The exhibition also addresses the important idea of the post-human. In Margo Trushina’s work MY SECOND BODY: Exercise of Entangled Empathy (2021), there is a clear line of inquiry stemming from posthuman feminism research. Trushina references Daisy Hildyard’s book, the Second Body (2017), which argues that every living thing has two bodies: the physical body and a body embedded in a worldwide network of ecosystems. This branch of posthumanism concerns embodied experience and its potential to critique patriarchal forms of humanity’s domination over nature. The work conveys the interdependence of humans with other beings, matter, the environment and the planet. The different elements such as plants, corals, bacteria in water, objects that resemble gym equipment, natural rock formations, blown glass, a curtain made of skin-like silicon – are all held together in a delicate balance. There is a sense that the installation is a cyborg or some kind of hybrid, sustaining its own ecosystem. Some elements also suggested ‘care’, fitting, perhaps, as the title contains the word ‘empathy’. The dusty pink curtain recalls hospital bed partitions as if to evoke the current timeframe of the Covid-19 pandemic. Behind it, an accompanying video generated by an artificial neural network shows shape-shifting images of humans, animals, plants and machines mutating into new forms.

KT: Trushina’s installation expresses hope for a post-human future outlined by philosopher Donna Haraway: a future in which humanity has expanded the scope of moral concern to include non-humans. Her multispecies collaboration requires ‘sympoiesis’ or making-with, rather than ‘autopoiesis’ or self-making.

ML: This idea of ‘making-with’ is wonderfully imagined in Bart Hajduk’s drawings, which depict intimate scenes of strange hybrid and multispecies beings. A day in the life and death of a flower (2021) is a mythological depiction of the perpetual cycle of plant life across four seasons, day and night, life and death, birth and rebirth – markers of temporality that influence our perception of time. However, these drawings also draw attention to the various agents that contribute to the reproduction of life, with elements in the picture suspended as if in a magical dance of codependency.

Bart Hajduk, A day in the life and death of a flower, 2021. Installation view, 2021. Photography by Rosie Taylor — Bart Hajduk, *A day in the life and death of a flower*, 2021. Installation view, 2021. Photography by Rosie Taylor

There are many bleak representations of post-anthropocene worlds but Hajduk’s drawings return to the exquisiteness of the life (and death) cycle. In Life After Death (2021) Hajduk suggests a continuation of ecology through death. In this drawing, Hajduk reveals a subterranean world of root systems that connect ghostly beings to each other, their bodies integrated with the black soil. Life comes from death, and when we decompose we fertilise the ground, generating new life forms.

Bart Hajduk, Life After Death, 2021, Installation view 2021. Photography by Rosie Taylor — Bart Hajduk, *Life After Death*, 2021, Installation view 2021. Photography by Rosie Taylor

KT: An inclusive definition of life is also explored in Jasmin Märker’s work My Immortals (2019). The large silk hanging investigates the human body by drawing attention to the microbes within and around us, many of which are essential for our survival. Cultures were taken from both the artist’s body (ear, armpit and gut) and her environment (dog, shower, sinks, fridge and soil) together with slime-mould and mushroom cultures. The digitised versions of these cultures were patched together to form a mandala-like pattern, suggesting a spiritual ideology that destabilises the hierarchical ordering of humanity above nature. Its dominating position from the ceiling is framed by large windows. The work rejects the idea that the body is a single identity and brings attention to the porous membrane between ourselves and our environment.

ML: Märker’s work emphasises the biology we often overlook. In their new work Landscapes (2021), Märker critiques colonial narratives in biodiversity and interspecies networks, particularly in relation to human impact. Landscapes is a series of collages made with plant material, soil chromatographies (a soil analysis that creates a reactive image) and paper made from site-specific vegetation, e.g. birch polypore mushroom. It responds to the ordered herbarium in which plant specimens are preserved, labelled and stored – a very human way of thinking about nature. Each collage tells the story of a unique place in time within different environments in Ireland. For example, one ‘landscape’ is an ancient forest and another a potato plantation.

Jasmin Märker, Landscapes, 2021, Installation view, 2021. Photography by Rosie Taylor — Jasmin Märker, *Landscapes*, 2021, Installation view, 2021. Photography by Rosie Taylor

ML: What do you want the visitor to take away from this exhibition?

KT: That nothing exists independently or is fully ‘itself’. I hope the visitor will recognise the interdependence and interconnectedness of all living and nonliving things through time. Acknowledging that even humans cannot extricate themselves from this mesh can help us understand what ecology means as a whole.

Kristine Tan is an independent curator whose interests lie at the intersection of contemporary art, research and technology, bearing a sense of urgency for current times. She is currently the programmes coordinator for artist residencies at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and has experience in exhibition-making at the Artscience Museum in Singapore.

Curators Conversation: Entanglements in Time

Surreal-Absurd-Sampler Brian Clifton

Surreal-Absurd Sampler Glen Armstrong