February 8 – March 10, 2024
Bienvenu Steinberg & J is pleased to present Crude Gratitude, an exhibition curated by Alice Audouin, a leading pioneer in the field of contemporary art and the environment in France and beyond. The exhibition features works by Art Orienté Objet, Sara Favriau, Peter Kim, Haroon Mirza, Otobong Nkanga, and Michael Wang.
Is gratitude a new trait of civilization? Extending towards the living and the cosmos, does it announce a more ecological civilization to come? Are contemporary environmental artists pioneering this new era? The exhibition explores this potentiality by bringing together six contemporary artists who adopt the praxis of care and promote interspecies collaboration. The artists in Crude Gratitude present an alternative lens to perceive the world, guided by attention towards each entity, whether on a microscopic or cosmic scale: an ecology of empathy.
Gratitude, a central tenet in most religions and philosophies, assumes a pivotal role. How might gratitude function as a tool in the realms of eco-psychology and art? Deployed as an antidote to the isolation pervading a world that was arrested by the Covid pandemic, gratitude emerges as a salient response. This emergence coincides with an increasing awareness of the fragility of human existence, amplified against the backdrop of climate change, international armed conflicts, and the alarming decline in biodiversity. The artists featured in Crude Gratitude embody a 'world mentality,' a transformative attitude defined by Edouard Glissant, as an alternative to globalization, a reorientation away from the confines of human-centrism, where humans take responsibility as active participants in a larger system.
Otobong Nkanga places care at the heart of her practice to draw clear paths of resilience in an overexploited world. In Alterscape Stories: Uprooting the Past (2006 - 2016), created during a residency in the Canary Islands, the artist reconstitutes a landscape traversed by time. Here, she portrays herself in the present, framed by a distant past that embodies undamaged nature and a future of destruction replete with natural disasters. The artist exhumes the shrouded parts of human history.
Using solar energy both as a sculptural element and as a source of light and sound, Haroon Mirza combines his practice with anthropology to craft a novel mythological and symbiotic relationship with the sun, for which he imagines new rituals. In this work, born of a conversation with English choreographer Wayne McGregor, a van door and solar panel lean against each other, creating a canopy, a sound space.
For 30 years, Art Orienté Objet has been harnessing shamanic forces as a healing tool for humans and the natural world. This French duo, pioneers in associating art, ecology, and ethology, created three apotropaic drums for the exhibition, awake, charged, and alive. They express their gratitude to environmental activists and whistleblowers, including leading figure Greta Thunberg. Additionally, they pay homage to Aby Warburg, a harbinger of the present ecological crisis, in a video translated into English for the first time.
Michael Wang adjusts the lens of the human gaze and consciousness to the scale of global issues. He brings focus to three major themes in his work: firstly, the ethics of interspecies relations, based on his research into the IUCN's Extinct in the Wild list; secondly, the environmental transformations of major landscapes and natural sites by disrupting the sculptural vocabulary of Lake Tai (China) with proliferating algae; and thirdly, the roots of the carbon-based world responsible for changing the climate, in the form of a tribute to its plant origins and the prodigals of photosynthesis.
Repriser le feu #2 is a site-specific installation created for the exhibition by French artist Sara Favriau. The artist selected and sculpted the scorched remnants left by the megafire that swept through the Landes forest in France in 2022; then, she waited for the first thorn bushes to weave a braid as a new symbolic narrative connecting humanity and its surroundings.
Peter Kim, drawing inspiration from the ocean, channels the oceanic feeling denied to him in his youth under the dictatorial regime in place at the time in South Korea. Through the deliberate slowness of his practice, the sobriety of his colors, and the meticulous attention paid to nature and memory, the artist seeks a way of being in the world that is as fair and light as possible. He reminds us that nothing can be owned, and that everything only truly exists through a revelation.
