March 3, 17, & 24, 2021 • Presented by The Gallatin Galleries and NYU Gallatin WetLab with support from the NYU Gallatin Dean’s Award for Graduating Seniors
What’s missing from mainstream dialogues about climate crises?
How can artistic practices unearth the complexities inherent in experiences of environmental injustice and climate emergency?
How can artworks activate our collective power to imagine more equitable, habitable futures?
Press Your Ear to the Wind is a three-part event series curated by Alumni-Curator-in-Residence Ellie New that unites artists and audiences around the above questions. Borrowing its title from Deborah Jack’s artwork and poem “Foremothers”, this series is an invitation to listen to the wisdom held in the land, water, and our own bodies, and to trace the currents of resilience that flow from our inherited pasts into the futures we generate.
In their own ways, each of these artists investigates relationships with place, cultural inheritance, ritual, and embodiment as modes of resistance to the systems that spur climate crises. In each virtual “duet”, two artists will share their artworks and ideas, untangling both the individual and the shared strands of their perspectives. Weaving art, conversation, and questioning across disciplinary and geographical boundaries, this series celebrates the power of art and artists to dismantle structures of oppression through acts of care, embodied imagination, and bold action.
Click on the links below to read more about each duet, access additional resources, and watch the event recordings.
Duet 1: Wednesday, March 3, 2021 at 2pm via Zoom, free with registration
Fathoming Uncertainty: Performing with(in) Vulnerable Landscapes with Eiko Otake and Sarah Cameron Sunde
How do artists use their own bodies to articulate pressing issues of environmental injustice and collective vulnerability across places, timescales, and cultures?
Duet 2: Wednesday, March 17, 2021 at 10am via Zoom, free with registration
Between Belief and Reality: Revealing Water Crises in Textile & Sculpture with Vibha Galhotra & Tali Weinberg (BA ’04; MA ’12)
How do artists transform scientific observation to reveal the realities of water crises in the face of denial, dismissal, and inaction?
Duet 3: Wednesday, March 31, 2021 at 2pm via Zoom, free with registration
Currents of Memory: The Sea, Ritual, and Rebirth in Film with Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons & Deborah Jack
How do we experience the land and the sea as containers or agents of memory? How can inherited and personal rituals amplify our interconnectedness with the landscapes we inhabit?
Curator’s Introductions
Over the past few years, I’ve started to wonder what’s missing from mainstream dialogues about climate crises. I found that, as I sought to understand the complex histories, realities, and projections of environmental destabilization, it was most often artists who articulated these issues in ways that connected with my gut as well as my mind. This series emerged as a way to celebrate the power of artists to translate the anxieties, hopes, and pain that are wrapped up in the issue of climate crisis in ways that might enable us to better comprehend and navigate its challenges. By gathering, and by bringing artists together in conversation, it’s my hope that we can expand our capacity to imagine and generate more equitable, habitable futures both locally and globally.
Duet #1: Eiko Otake & Sarah Cameron Sunde
Eiko Otake is a movement based interdisciplinary artist born in Japan and based in NYC. Throughout her career, she has taken on many roles – soloist, curator, collaborator, writer, teacher, mischief-maker. I got to know Eiko as her student at Gallatin a few years ago, which is where my interest in curating environmentally-oriented artworks really began, and where I became entranced by her solo work and artistic voice. I’m in awe of her ability to transpose thought into movement, individual into collective experience, and vulnerability into power.
Sarah Cameron Sunde–also based in New York City–is an interdisciplinary artist and Director who works in performance video and public art. Her project 36.5/A Durational Performance with the Sea was presented at the Gallatin Galleries this past fall in a beautiful exhibition curated by Keith Miller. I had the opportunity to interview Sarah about her work for the show, and when I was considering artists to invite to participate in this series, her artistic voice was fresh in my mind. I love what her project asks of its viewers: to practice slow looking, to spend time with it, and to imagine the sensation and power of the water with which she performs in their own bodies.
What excites me about this pairing is that both artists investigate visible and invisible risks, the interdependence of our bodies with land and water, and changing relationships with both place and time in sites of environmental vulnerability or disaster. Using their bodies as a means to scale the vastness of crisis to an intimate, personal level, these artists demonstrate that climate crisis isn’t a future event to anticipate; it has been brewing for centuries and is already acutely felt.
Duet #2: Vibha Galhotra & Tali Weinberg
I learned about Tali Weinberg’s Woven Datascapes through an exhibition curated by Eugenia Kisin at the Gallatin Galleries a couple of years ago. I’m fascinated by the way she makes scientific data–which is typically “flattened” to be more objective or publicly accessible–into three dimensional constructions that layer tradition, emotion, and color. These woven artworks are, in form and content, a realization of the interconnected nature of climate crises as well as our own intricate connections with environmental degradation.
I’ve been entranced by Vibha Galhotra’s sculptural series Flow since I first encountered it a year ago. I’m fascinated by the way she uses these delicate, glittering adornments to bring shape, texture, and depth to a reality that is both troubling and dangerous. Often based in site-specific observation and response, her multidisciplinary projects range from community-engaged participatory installations on air pollution in New Delhi to sculptures of environmental damage created in paper, concrete, ghungroo bells, and found materials or debris.
I’m excited about how both Vibha and Tali investigate global issues by tending to local concerns, spending time in each place they work from and imbuing that time into their artistic processes. While both artists deal frequently with water, they also articulate water crises’ wide-ranging impacts and entanglements–including ramifications on health, agriculture, and housing. They transform scientific data and observations into emotional understanding, inviting deeper knowledge by making that data less immediately legible. In doing so, they remind us how spirituality, tradition, and our sensory perceptions are integral in navigating contemporary environmental issues.
Duet #3: Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons & Deborah Jack
Deborah Jack’s artwork has grounded so much of my research and thinking for this series. She has generously lent her artwork and a phrase of her poetry for our title: Press Your Ear to the Wind. In her multimedia practice, Deborah explores the resonance of traumatic historical events in her home of Saint Maarten and beyond, reckoning with these histories as they persist in nature and in both collective and personal memories. I love how her work articulates the borderless-ness of time and place, land and sea, reminding us that the past is alive in our present and celebrating nature’s potential for rebirth.
Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons is an icon of contemporary art and one of the most generous and unflagging artists I’ve had the honor of meeting. Magda is well-known for her performances, installations, and large-scale photographic works, which investigate how memory, history, gender, and religion unite to form our identities. In addition to being a multidisciplinary artist, she is a curator, mentor, and professor, and is currently the Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University. Magda’s explorations of the sea trace the shapes of memory, history, and longing, often dealing with the interplay of arrivals and departures that characterize Caribbean diasporas. I’m continually moved by how she places her own figure in the frame to create works that tie inherited rituals to personal embodied experiences of water and belonging, reminding me again of the interconnectedness of our bodies and nature.
Water has emerged a through-line in this series, and today’s conversation centers around relationships with the sea. Faced with the rise of Atlantic hurricanes, coastal erosion, sea level rise, over-salinization, and continued climate-induced migration, these artists’ explorations of the sea, particularly of the Caribbean sea, become urgent. Both artists explore places where history spills into our present: a grounding condition of what is often called “the Anthropocene”–this era characterized by the impact of human activity on the planet, and in which the climate crises we’re facing today have cultural and historical roots. I’m excited about how Deborah and Magda’s artworks renegotiate the supposed boundaries between our bodies, histories, and nature, reminding us that, even in the midst of loss and vulnerability, nature can be a site of healing, resilience, and rebirth.
– Ellie New
As part of our ongoing collaboration at WetLab, I invited my fellow Alumni-Curator-in-Residence Ayaka Fujii to co-create reflections on each of the events in Press Your Ear to the Wind. Over the course of the series’ six weeks, we created a series of “scores” and invitations for further reflection based on each of the duet conversations.
Lingering: reflections, questions, and scores for continued engagement
in collaboration with Ayaka Fujii
Duet #1
How do we inhabit time in crisis?
The Earth’s tidal bulge as breath, as breathing (an image from Sarah Cameron Sunde)
“I shouldn’t be here.” (Eiko, on her proximity to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant)
Where is your physical being prohibited? Where is your movement restricted? What kind of movement is possible, even in such a space?
Body as measuring stick
Body as conduit
Body as deep time
Body as cycles
Body as body of water
Body as a historied place
Body as thread
Body as microcosm
Body as archive
Close your eyes and “go” somewhere. Where are you now? Where do you spend the longest length of time? Where are your feet touching? How do you “tune in” to a place? What does it ask of you? How does it affect your breath? How does it nourish you? What is included in its “DNA”? How does it feel to linger in the immensity of a place and its history? What is the scale of your body in relation to this place? How does its memory hold you? How do you contribute to its memory? How does this place linger with you?
Duet #2
“I trace relationships between climate change, water, extractive industry, illness, and displacement; between personal and communal loss; and between corporeal and ecological bodies.” – Tali Weinberg
How do you trace the relationships between corporeal and ecological bodies?
Ask someone close to you / Have a conversation around:
“Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” (from Vibha’s works)
Where do belief and reality intertwine in issues of climate crises?
What scales of time do you feel and archive?
What kind of data does your body hold?
What do you labor over/in? Where does your labor live in relation to your ecological and cultural lineages? Do you find labor in ritual, or ritual in labor?
What is sacred to you? Where is sacred to you?
Your/my/our body is sacred.
Your/my/our body is polluted.
Your/my/our body is ebbing.
Your/my/our body is flowing.
Your/my/our body is cyclical.
Your/my/our body is porous.
Your/my/our body is water and its edges.
Duet #3
What is your relationship to the sea?
Where do you feel the sea in your body?
Where does your body find restoration?
Where are your edges?
Where do your borders become mutable?
Where is your reservoir?
Where do the shorelines within you meet?
Where is your geography calling you?
Contemplations for being ‘here’:
soften your edges.
feel,
your feet making contact with the ground
the small dance happening in stillness and inner movement
your body as a constellation of waves, arriving and departing
the borderlessness between your skin and space
breathe,
to feel a letting and listening
to feel a deep connectedness
“we are the same thing”*
find,
a reservoir in the soft places
in the continuum of time,
behind you, here, and before you
move,
in a duet with the waters of your body
the waters of the air
of the soil
of the rivers and seas
“the saliva / the amniotic waters /
that flow / in / under / ground / streams” **
waters that pull and push at your softened edges
that erode the borders of time to shape a world continually remade
by the accumulation of histories and memory’s fluidity
currents that intertwine life and death and life again
to draw up the threads of (re)memory
that tangle in the spaces between
to “press your ear to the wind” **
to be “many in one” *
like how a wave moves through time.
* “We are the same thing. Saltwater, sweetwater, freshwater. This is not art. This is life – unfair, unfinished, disrupting, brutal, gorgeous, full of promise. Find imbalance. Being many in one. Finding balance, finding justice, find [that] inside us, we are the same thing. A tornado, a hurricane, a small fountain. Embodiment of the history of power, of inclusion, exclusion. We are the same thing.” (Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons)
** Foremothers (2002) by Deborah Jack.
