Entangled Intimacies, Goethe Institute Johannesburg
Io Makandal | Group Show curated by Rory Thomas with artists Natalie Paneng and Tzung-Hui Lauren Lee
10/02/2023 - 06 / 05 /2023
Entangled Intimacies is an arts-based and curatorial research endeavour that seeks to explore (to a necessarily limited degree) what it might mean to not only be situated within ecological chaos, but to quite literally embody it. This work hopes to find differentiated ways of relating to more-than-human worlds through art in an attempt to evade anthropocentric thinking and the environmental degradation it perpetuates. Featuring new experiential and predominantly installation-based works from Johannesburgbased artists Tzung-Hui Lauren Lee, Io Makandal, and Natalie Paneng, this exhibition, in line with the complexities of ecological thinking, stands as a transdisciplinary and durational spatial experiment. Through mutable practices of artistic worldbuilding and exploration, the works featured in the show – which are open to change and variation throughout its three-month timeline – present opportunities for thinking-, feeling-, and becoming-with the varied terrestrial beings with which we share this intimate planetary bond. Spanning a variety of interdisciplinary modes of artmaking, the works in the Entangled Intimacies exhibition extend their conceptual and material reach far beyond any singular or normative critique of climate change. Ranging from monumental considerations of global atmospheric conditions, to subtle durational reflections on errant landscapes, and the impacts of interconnected digitality on more-than-human worlds, this exhibition tacitly poses an opportunity to engage the climate catastrophe otherwise. The Entangled Intimacies programme will also feature a collection of events centred around its conceptual and aesthetic themes. Sometime during its run, the show will also be supplemented by a co-authored and collaborative forthcoming publication designed to be engaged in conjunction with the central themes of the exhibitionary element. This exhibition is presented as part of the Young Curators Incubator – a programme conceived in collaboration between the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg and the Wits School of Arts History of Art department. The exhibition is curated by Rory Thomas.