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saraceno at the serpentine + kiefer at the white cube

it’s been two weekends in a row now that i have gone to see a free exhibition which turned out to be incredible, so i think i can say i’m on a winning streak. granted, these are some big names, so a bad show would have been a surprise, but you never know !



the saraceno show at the serpentine is a collection of different projects all centered around… hm. ecological mysticism, i suppose, mixed with very practical and definite interventions and projects. things on show included: spiderwebs woven by real spiders (beautiful, fragile, some patterns i have never ever seen before), two film projections, a confessional booth of spider vibrations (fantastic), an ecological manifesto, mechanical and electrical intervention, and a bee/bird/hedghehog hotels outside the gallery space, among others.

the m&e mods to the building in particular made me very pleased… the exhibition relied solely on the power from the new solar panels on the roof, which meant it was dependent on the weather ! if it’s very cloudy and the panels are not able to generate enough energy, some of the electrical equipment required for the exhibition simply won’t run - lights, projectors… we were lucky enough to go on a sunny day, but i thought this was an amazing way to weave the principles of the show into its structure… affecting the built environment and the audience alike (you either can see only half the show, or you have to come again another time!). why should everything be available to us all the time…? i hope they thought through the end-of-life strategy for the exhibition (surely they must have!!!) and that the solar panels are retained, or at least moved to another building so they can continue to run.

the m&e part of the work was titled ‘ballad of weather dependency’, as wink-wink-nudge reference to nan goldin’s ‘ballad of sexual dependency’, which i thought was quite funny. the show in general had quite a bit of humour going for it… for leaving your phone at a ‘reception’ you got as a gift a randomly-picked little tarot-looking card from an ‘aranchomancy’ deck, which was quite cute (mine was ‘multiverse’). there was also a whole room devoted to the spider divination practiced in cameroon, with videos of spider divination interpreters taken straight from a website studioTS made for them. the page has an ad banner running along the bottom (‘ask the spider a question! click here to request a consultation today!’). spider consultation fees (high!!!) are all channelled towards local community projects. some questions have been published on the website already (highlight for me from hans ulrich obrist: ‘hans asks the spider: are we here?’ ‘spider answers: we are here, but hans is not.’).

while some of it is intended to make you smile (the ad banner) or does so by accident (?) (‘do spiders know everything?’ ‘the spider answers: yes.’), the principle of it is treated extremely seriously. i think in general there was this air of mysticism around the show that managed not to come across as new age-y at all, but rather as like… a sense of curiosity, and wonder, and fun. the show is not asking you to believe the spider, but to respect that some people do, and to understand that non-human species can communicate in ways that we can interpret and admire and think about in more depth. (the divination, but also the spider web architecture) (and also - see timothy morton, again!!! bookmarked as a thought for later)

(another angle, as i’ve just finished reading it in relation to something else i’m turning over in my mind: berger writes in ‘why look at animals?’ about the ‘abyss of non-comprehension’ between man and animal… while the spider divination tradition is a clear attempt at inter-species communication, involving multiple levels of translation - translation between human languages -> vibration spider language -> symbolic spider divination language… this is very fresh, not sure yet how it stacks up for me. to mull over)

the second projection, in the biggest room, was of a solar powered balloon flight that took place in 2020 over the salinas grandes salt flat. the salt flat is home to some of the indigenous communities of argentina and is also a site of lithium extraction. so the project was partially exploring the possibilities of fossil fuel free air travel + served as a protest against ecological devastation of the flats. also filmed was the alfarcito gathering, where researchers, lawyers, and the salt flats community discussed political action + the continued exploitation of south america for raw material to fuel the ‘green transition’ of the ‘’’’global north’’’’ countries.

i think what will stay with me, from the film, (aside from like, a general rage at the world, but that’s a constant) is the scene of when the balloon and it’s pilot start to take flight… a large gathering of people, adults and children, walking the bright white salt flats, some of them holding hands with each other, or with the pilot, surrounding her… and the pilot walks with this huge black balloon billowing up and behind her, walks walks walks and goes up, one two three steps, camera shots close to the ground of her feet lifting, comes down to walk again, and again up up up holding hands floating, down and up finally fully in the air, people continue to walk down below with her as she floats metres above their heads. all this over a song sung by someone from the community, almost acapella. magical mystical.

this has also made me think, again, (i keep coming back to it on different occasions!) of the andy sewell project about the internet cables running beneath the ocean… which i think is very good and also very moving. there is always a price to pay, by someone.

(as a side note - that particular balloon flight was the artwork that was part of connect, beets back in early 2020. the current exhibition does not mention this anywhere, so i had a bit of an ‘aha!’ brief moment of amusement while watching the documentary film.

i remember initially it was being sold by beetses as a ‘commission’, which now on pacha website has become a footnote saying ‘supported by’ and on saraceno’s own page is a ‘part of a show curated by’. the project is also very clearly a part of a larger body of work, so i feel ‘supported by’ is a more fitting term anyway. the ‘connect, beets’ official website is now completely dead, btw, it does not exist anymore, which. of course it doesn’t…

i’ve also re-watched the video available through the beets youtube channel about the project, which feels so very different to what i’ve seen today at the exhibition, and obviously there is no mention of a) lithium (despite shots of the balloon where the huge ass writing of ‘el agua y la vida valen más que el litio’ is very clearly visible), b) exploitation of any kind and c) the salinas grandes indigenous community. instead it’s just a generic ‘sustainable future’ take and commentary. yeah, ok. quote highlight from the beets video: ‘fly with areocene pacha is as utopian an impulse as beetses’ attempt to change entrenched attitudes on a global scale’. like, girl… what are you smoking…..… props to studioTS for taking the money when offered and running away with it. glad the beetses are not mentioned anywhere in this particular exhibit, as any mention of them tends to derail the whole fucking conversation. or used to, at least!)

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the white cube kiefer exhibition is easier to summarise, but a lot more opaque in its meaning. one sentence summary: kiefer interprets joyce’s finneagan’s wake. i think a detailed description is less necessary than it was for saraceno, because the work is more emotional, slippery, and impossible to analyse object by object and the scale is monumental. dark corridor full of old rusted items from kiefer’s (vast) catalogue, self-referential, meditative. quotes from joyce scribbled everywhere like writings of a madman, or a prophet. rooms of gigantic paintings, piles of metal, piles of concrete, smell of hay. one double height room filled to the ceiling with more shelves and objects, white white light from above - feels like a divine intervention, or a reprieve. i’ve said it elsewhere and i think it holds: in four or five rooms he has managed to contain the world.

i’m not sure if i have reached any real conclusions from the kiefer-joyce conversation, but the exhibition feels so vast, and contemplative, and devastating, that i don’t think it matters. as soon as you step through the entrance into the arsenal, you step through time and - as it is kiefer we are talking about - there is only one (1) time period you could be revisiting. the feeling dissipates a little in the side rooms, i think the works start to echo and reflect on times more modern, but as the rooms all connect to the main corridor of the arsenal… hm. arsenal as the spine? the wound running across everything else? (or is that too much of an interpretation…?) in any case - i think - current, or future devastation reflected back onto, or connected with?, the devastation of 1939-45. or maybe the rubble of history, in general.

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seeing these exhibitions one by one inevitably makes me place them in conversation with one another. in my mind i have both of these artists standing back to back, staring at the same things but in different directions… one eye sees the past, one eye sees the future. a bit of a ying and yang situation…? also vastly different modes of engagement, where TS looks at the world through active engagement with it, AK folds inwards and to things long past, in stillness. or alternatively - TS looking for a possibility of surviving the present and the future by looking at the practices of the past / of a world that largely does not exist anymore / or one that is being suppressed from existing vs. AK predicting / prophesising / anticipating the future through examining (relentlessly) the past… or something along these lines. maybe the comparison is only feasible on a superficial level, but i think i will leave it at that.

(i think i also maybe overdid it on attributing only doom and gloom to kiefer’s work - he did paint some sunflowers……? that is surely a positive sign…)

really beautiful work from both.

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this was written all in one go in some sort of feverish trance after coming home from the gallery… i had things to say, clearly ! but it is now past 2am and so - i must sleep. thanks for reading and welcome to my blog !!!! :)

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link to the online version of (or some of) the saraceno exhibition here: https://studiotomassaraceno.org/web-s-of-life/ and here: https://studiotomassaraceno.org/wol/ warning for, uh. spiders.

ecological manifesto here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfl_OW5eY_lZNABezGBhsbL3fy2xPOSpB0qwifkjnkA0B6y1A/viewform?pli=1

internet cable project here: http://www.andysewell.com/known-and-strange-things-pass

kiefer overview here: https://www.whitecube.com/gallery-exhibitions/anselm-kiefer-finnegans-wake