#新展预告 ｜Liminal Odysseys 跨阈漫游

In an act of fluid refusal and a stealthy occupying of the liminal space of contra-taxonomies, the artist Kalman Pool invites us to embark on a journey of discovery through a series of encounters with uncanny mutations, porous binaries and otherwise worldly ecologies in his solo show Liminal Odysseys. Walking towards the unknown and paralleling the titular journey of Odysseus, we are confronted with a slippery search for identity – both our own and of the critters we encounter– as we are presented with Kalman Pool’s menagerie of beings, ethereal flouro chirography and dreamy inflatable monoliths in his first solo show at Jupiter Museum of art.

The triadic structure and logic of the exhibition invites a cross-pollination and a trans-mutation of associations between the full and extensive range of the artist’s complex practice; spanning 2D paintings and calligraphy to 3D inflatables , a new solid state carbon fibre sculpture and fully immersive installations -  taking us into extra-worldly imaginaries that defy gravity, disrupt hierarchies of categorization and taxonomy and continue to evade any hegemonic regimes of scale.

This evasion and direct soft protest against classification and taxonomy is a constant line through all of Kalman Pool’s work, and as the artist summons his creatures into being through various material states and spaces they begin to occupy the non-space, the liminal, and inhabit a position of quiet, dreamy slippages of identity. From the central creaturely monument Z-Tex which occupies the main space of the gallery, ( the artists first piece rendered in carbon fibre ), we are presented with a mimetic speculative species, a poetic hybridization, a monsterly apparition that defies classification but which compels us to seek connections and familiar points of reference. This knee-jerk compulsion towards chasing labels, tags, categories and seeking to neatly position the unknown beast in prefab taxonomies speaks directly to our pre-disposition that we as humans possess towards a hard wiring into rendering the “other” into convenient colonial silos. Each morphic creature that is presented in Liminal Odysseys triggers this thwarted attempt at antiquated regimes of labelling and packaging. Our myopic adherence to binaries is unseated, usurped and unsettled as we now exist in a society with more porous boundaries between identity markers, the fluidity and flow through previously hard-edged signifiers is beginning to be diffracted, and we enter unchartered territory on a daily basis as the non-normative begins to take up space amongst the regimented binaries of the real and the virtual, gender, race, social positioning and political alliances.

Kalman Pool’s inflatable sculptures have always contained within them this set of contingencies and tensions and in this exhibition as we are presented with his collection of over 20 inflatable pieces we are unequivocally thrown into the liminal space as we are confronted with these wilfully precarious and contingent beings that embody the very essence of his practice. Born and conceived in the virtual world and manifested and birthed into the physical white cube space these creatures of the twilight spaces in-between throw us into a state of deep dreamy reflection and move us towards a vision of taxonomy imagined otherwise. A re-imaging of colonial regimes of order and aesthetic borderlines begin to be redrawn.

In the exhibition, as Kalman Pool clearly references organic life and ecologies rendered through the optic of computational language and processes, graphic novels and popular culture there is a sense that when we view his collection of creatures together in this way there are familial connections to be made with each other. The associations and lineages invited through this reading of his hybrid species are multiple, fluid and unfixed – a collection of  anti-breeds that co-exist together but that deny patriarchal, colonial, heteronormative classification. The “look-like” and uncanny qualities of the creatures presented to us in the exhibition are designed to complicate and extend our perspectives on systems of classification and identity and perhaps import into the white cube space the potential radical agency of the virtual context where embodied knowledge and experience could render the potential for new forms of taxonomies and hive mind multiple readings on identities in flux if used more cogently in the future.   

Mutating through scales of macro to micro; the totality of critterly sculptures that occupy a totemic anti-gravity dream-space to two dimensional representations of jump cut narratives in Kalman Pool’s wall canvasses and paintings, to the flouro-tinged lexicon of mutating forms of language and calligraphy in space, the artist breaks down normative boundaries whilst contemporaneously enhancing the commonalities between entities, scales, materialities, linguistic utterances and species.

In Staying with the Trouble, feminist techno scientist Donna Haraway proposes that, in order to survive the dramatic effects of climate crisis, we must rethink our relationships with other species and the earth and build towards a more liveable future. For Harraway this entails an embracing of understanding around how things exist in a contingent relationship within complex ecological systems and acknowledging the impact of divergences and inconsistencies within networks. She posits the Chthulucene as the framework for understanding and living as situated beings in our highly connected and connective world through creating the conditions for ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with.  Her position rejects the individualism commonly associated with identity-seeking and introduces the idea instead of relational ethics. Turning her attention to the creaturely world she applies this to thinking in relation to creatures and beings who are entangled and interlaced within our world; from computational networks to jellyfish to forests and domestic animal companions, composts to fungus. Echoing through to the Odyssey and encounter with long histories of monsters and other worldly creatures such as Scylla and Charybdis, Haraway speculates that staying with the connected, half-imagined beings of the earth offers up a different read on the future:

“ The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures .”

As we are invited to place ourselves directly into the imaginary, liminal space  of the Chthulucene in the exhibition Liminal Odysseys we find ourselves in tentative dialogue with morphous generative monsters and critters and asked to understand ourselves in relation to this precarious state of being as we begin to shape-shift as much as the speculative beings inflated in front of us. We are encouraged to stay with the trouble of refusal of identity and classification in line with Haraway and celebrate the unresolved, unfinished, unstable taxonomies of Kalman Pool’s liminal menagerie:

“[S]taying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings”.

个展

2021

不能承受之轻，巽美术馆，顺德，中国

KALMAN POOL（驻地项目），木星美术馆，深圳，中国

变异加速，红门画廊，北京，中国

新编旧叙，iag 艺术院线，TX 淮海，上海，中国

群展

2022

The Pump House，Berntson Bhattacharjee 画廊，伦敦，英国

Les Animaux modèles—动物模型, Royal Over-Seas League (皇家海外联盟), 伦敦，英国

每个人心中都有一座城，春美术馆，上海，中国

万相丛林，海汇美术馆，郑州，中国

倒计时系列四，红门画廊，北京，中国

叙事现场的她，宝龙艺术中心，南京，中国

变翌，翌当代艺术中心，广州，中国

OUT OF HAND, Annmarie Sculpture Garden & Arts Center, 马里兰州道威尔, 美国

2021

London Grads Now. 21，萨奇画廊，伦敦，英国

Kristallisierte Bewegung—瞬时的格律，KUB画廊，莱比锡，德国

分身：我宇宙，寒山美术馆，苏州，中国

"自我"，年代美术馆，温州，中国

Hot Air，Manor Place Warehouse（由 BAD ART PRESENTS 策展)，伦敦，英国

Upstream溯, The Research House for Asian Art, 芝加哥，美国

梦境重混，四方美术馆，南京，中国

新潮势力，木星美术馆，深圳，中国

2020

数字人文，MOW无用博物馆，长沙，中国

时间知觉：解读时间的装置影像展，库茨艺术中心（由磁场计划策展），上海，中国

Counter Point，RCA 庭院画廊，伦敦，英国

2019

Melon Cauli，Asylum Chapel，伦敦，英国

Playground V2，Venue MOT Unit 18，伦敦，英国

2016 年

技术图像，Elastic Arts Foundation，芝加哥，美国

2015

博物馆：内在与外在，冬宫博物馆，圣彼得堡，俄罗斯

艺术家驻地项目

2021

斯沃琪和平饭店艺术中心驻留项目，上海，中国

木星美术馆艺术家驻留项目，深圳，中国

2020

PLAN8T AIR，长沙，中国

奖项与合作

2023

Kalman Pool x Lincoln，林肯，2023上海国际车展，中国

2021

SWATCH X YOU（斯沃琪艺术家特别腕表），瑞士国家馆，海南消博会，中国

Rachel Falconer Bio.

Rachel Falconer is the founder of the collective Mutable Prototype Syndicate, an independent digital art curator, researcher and writer operating at the critical intersections of contemporary art practice, feminist technoscience, emergent technologies, civic data infrastructures and networked culture.

She is Head of Digital Arts Computing and a Lecturer in the Department of Computing at Goldsmiths University London. Drawing on her sustained interest in networked art practice and alternative curatorial strategies to inform her systems-based practice, Rachel has conceived and delivered multi-scale interdisciplinary public programming, alternative exhibition models and innovative public research platforms spanning a diversity of critical modes of engagement with technology. She has curated and conceived exhibitions and artist residencies which engage with radical logics and politics of distributed audiences and exhibition modelling, and is dedicated to the critical investigation of the complex relationship between network apparatus and the materiality of technological/social behaviours.

She is regularly invited to speak at public events and has participated in public programmes at institutions including; Transmediale,Tate, Barbican, ICA,V&A, Somerset House,  The Photographers Gallery, FACT, The Lumen Art Prize, The Lumen Prize, Whitechapel Gallery, Rhizome, Arebyte Gallery, London Design Festival, The Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam), FABRIKKEN (Copenhagen), Furtherfield and Gazelli Art House. Her writing and research has been published across a wide range of platforms including;  Routledge, Sternberg Press, The Guardian, Frieze, BOMB, Dazed Digital, The British Journal of Photography and The White Review.

Social Media :

INSTAGRAM: dia_mond_rf

TWITTER: @RachelMFalconer