THE ULTIMATE CAPITAL IS THE SUN
20 September – 16 November 2014
Opening: 19 September 2014, 19hr
nGbK / neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst
Oranienstrasse 25, 10999 Berlin
http://www.ngbk.de
http://theultimatecapital.org
Facebook event page
Artists: Pedro Barateiro, Ricardo Basbaum, Paolo Bottarelli, Anne Dukhee Jordan, Wietske Maas, Amina Menia, Yves Mettler, Pratchaya Phinthong, Timur Si-Qin, Sun Xun, Hakan Topal and Clemens von Wedemeyer.
With texts by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Reza Negarestani and Beatriz Preciado.
Curated by: Elena Agudio, Dorothee Albrecht, Bonaventure Ndikung, Matteo Pasquinelli, Eylem Sengezer.
The Greek word metabolē meant originally to change and, literally, to throw over. In times of worldwide human-made transformations, climate change and ecological awareness, expanding and exploding the notion of metabolism seems to be crucial to understand present and future politics. The exhibition investigates the understanding of ‘metabolism’ in contemporary art in a dialogue with philosophical and scientific research beyond Eurocentric rationalization.
Biological metabolism is a process that constitutes living beings in their continuous exchange with their environment. Photosynthesis, for instance, struggles to capture and condense solar energy at the basis of the food chain that sustains the whole biosphere. For the parasitic relation of terrestrial life with the outside cosmos, French philosopher Michel Serres in his book The Parasite once defined the sun as our energetic horizon and the very ‘ultimate capital’.
Like many other scientific ideas, as soon as the concept of metabolism emerged in the 19th century chemistry and biology, it generated a contagious fascination in art and politics. Marx himself registered the ‘metabolic rift’ provoked by the industrial revolution and envisioned a ‘social metabolism’ long before environmentalism. However today the human appears to be made also of the non-human, of a heterogeneous stratification of minerals and microorganism, including machines, synthetic materials and immaterial data.
The exhibition The Ultimate Capital is the Sun brings together artists, philosophers, scientists and curators to explore various grounds of metabolism with no desire to establish a centre of gravity.