Breathing Lessons
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): N Liebenberg
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In one of the chapters of the 1959 publication, 'Plant Pathology: An Advanced Treatise', two scientist, Ikuzo Uritani and Takashi Akazawa, formulated an equation for depicting what a change in the metabolic process of respiration in a plant caused by an outside pathogen might look like.
This exposition will use this equation as a starting point to think through empathy and more-than-human modes of being. Using disease and the afflicted body (human and more-than-human) it will explore how art-making and curatorship can translate this equation into the affective and the visual realm through various modes of play. In this manner, it will also speak back to, and subvert, the clinical scientific language through which these occurrences are conveyed in scientific communities - making the familiar strange to these practitioners.
Documentation of these various translations will take on the form of text, sound, video and images of personal explorations, as well as manifestations from a range of other artists and disciplines (such as architects, musicians, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers, to name a few). As such, the exposition will be an expanded 'object-study' of this equation, realised curatorially.
Fascination of Plants Day
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): N Liebenberg, Tero Heikkinen, Jennifer López Ortiz, Karen Sims-Huopaniemi, Wiktoria Fatz
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
For Fascination of Plants Day 2024, the Viikki Plant Science Centre and the University of the Arts are collaborating. Starting on the 18th of May, and continuing until the 18th of June, visitors can embark on a QR code treasure hunt in the Viikki Arboretum. On this trail, they will learn more about ongoing plant research, and discover diverse species. Each of the 22 research projects featured on this trail, is complemented by an artwork that provides a fresh perspective on our relationship with plants.
Fascination of Plants Day 2024 -tapahtumassa Viikin kasvitieteellinen keskus ja Taideyliopisto tekevät yhteistyötä. 18.5.–18.6. kävijät voivat lähteä QR-koodiaarrejahtiin Viikin arboretumille. Aarrejahdin polulla voi oppia lisää meneillään olevasta kasvitutkimuksesta ja löytää erilaisia lajeja. Jokaista tällä polulla esillä olevasta 22 tutkimushankkeesta täydentää taideteos, joka tarjoaa tuoreen näkökulman suhteeseemme kasveihin.
Chest: a botanical ecology
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): N Liebenberg
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Illness and disease affects us all. The treatment of these conditions, however, has been vast and varied, depending on the historical periods and the cultural context in and during which they are practiced. Situated in the Iziko South African Museum rock art gallery, where healing power is expressed in San paintings, this mobile set of cabinets explores a rich complex of healing practices through the display of a medicine chest which was donated to the University of Cape Town in 1978. This chest belonged to a British dentist, who practiced in Cape Town from 1904, and who bought the chest for a hunting trip he undertook in 1913 to (then) Northern Rhodesia. The idea of the chest gives rise to a variety of forms of healing: from instruments used to exorcise evil spirits and children's letters written to celebrate a heart transplant; to medicinal flowers bought at the Adderley Street flower market. The exhibition aims to visualise and materialise illness and its treatment from historical, cultural and disciplinary perspectives.
Drawing on well-established historical and contemporary connections between the disciplines of Botany, Medicine and Pharmacology, the exhibits also suggest latent links which are at times political, at times whimsical.
The Humineral Archives
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): N Liebenberg, Qiong Zhang, Heini Nieminen, Orla Mc Hardy, Frank Brümmel, Rut Karin Zettergren
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Humineral is a term that emerged from a Chinese online forum in February 2023, initially going viral and now subject to censorship in China. The word “humineral”— is a portmanteau of 人 rén (“person”) and 矿 kuàng (“ore,” “mineral deposit,” or “mine”) in the original Chinese.
We are a collective of artist researchers who have come together in Finland - originating from Finland, China, Ireland, Germany, Sweden, S. Africa and Jamaica - engaged in discourses and practices in the visual and performing arts related to ecology and environmental change. We are especially focused on multi-disciplinary approaches, from the sciences, arts and humanities, including legal and ethical implications.
This is a proposal towards the Venice Biennale 2026 Finnish Pavilion.
Assembling: Exhibition making and women’s labour
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): N Liebenberg
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
An exhibition curated by Carine Zaayman, Jade Nair, and Nina Liebenberg, presenting a moment of reflection on 'Under Cover of Darkness', a project concerned with the history of women in servitude, especially slavery, in the early colonial period at the Cape. Using exhibition-making, project members considered the development and outcomes of the 'Under Cover of Darkness' exhibition (2018) and the 'Uncovering: Women’s Invisible Labour in the Cape' symposium (2021), focusing on how feminist modes of collaboration and care can be enacted through the curatorial.
Diagnosing Loss
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): N Liebenberg
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Curated by Nina Liebenberg, 'Diagnosing Loss' is an exhibition that attempts to understand, navigate, measure, figure, calculate, and represent what we understand as loss. It takes, as its point of departure, the research conducted by social scientist Halina Suwalowska (Ethox Centre, Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, GLIDE Collaborative, University of Oxford) and artist Anna Suwalowska (Royal College of Art). The paintings featured in the exhibition (from their show 'Beyond the Body') examine the procedure of the autopsy as a last act of trying to understand the loss of life, and they grapple with how scientific and ethical standards on this procedure have changed over time and the dilemmas it poses to different cultures. 'Diagnosing Loss' extends these ideas by bringing together several artworks from Michaelis School of Fine Art staff, students, and graduates, along with objects sourced from the university's Physics, Pathology, Mathematics, Chemistry, Special Collections, Anatomy, and Biological Sciences Departments. These artworks and objects convey the different ways disciplines study and represent, but ultimately fail, at diagnosing loss.
