SHANGHAI.- The Institute of Contemporary Arts at NYU Shanghai presents ponds among ponds: an exhibition of threshold behavior & nested life (on view through 29 May), guest-curated by Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin (Reassembling the Natural), with artistic contributions by Agency, John Feldman with Lynn Margulis, Anne Duk Hee Jordan with Pauline Doutreluingne, MAO Chenyu, Maximilian Prüfer, and Monika Lin of Zaanheh Project. ponds among ponds is the final iteration of Springer and Turpin’s international exhibitionled inquiry Reassembling the Natural (2013–21), and the fourth and final season of the ICA’s inaugural artistic research program, The (Invisible) Garden (2019–21).

In a recent essay addressing the intersectional frictions of the novel coronavirus pandemic, the climate crisis, and recent microbiome research, the philosopher Tobias Rees remarked, “We humans are really little more than a multi-species ecosystem among multi-species ecosystems — ponds among ponds.” Borrowing this as an umbrella term for rethinking the relationship between organisms and their various endo- and exo-somatic ecologies, ponds among ponds: an exhibition of threshold behavior & nested life proposes an alternative approach to the presentation of natural history. Instead of beginning from the assumption that the organism is the basic unit of evolution, what if we consider the multi-scalar, nested ecologies of life as symbiotic sequences that challenge ideas of competition and survival of the fittest? The fundamental proposition of ponds among ponds is that the current concept of organismic life is insufficient for thinking with and adapting to contemporary climate and biodiversity crises.

Thinking with the pathbreaking work of evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis (1938–2011), ponds among ponds presents objects, images, texts, performances, and movements through artistic points of view, troubling current forms and proposing other organizations of life. The concept of “threshold behavior” contends that all organisms are ecologies unto themselves that operate as assemblages ordered and kept alive by various environmental gradients. While “nested life” challenges the predominant image of climate change as an eventuality wherein an organism (typically, a human organism), as a unit of coherent and sovereign volition, struggles against the outside forces of nature. Such an impoverished sense of threshold behavior leads to a repetition without difference. Instead, in order to begin to conceive of, and thereby adapt to, the massive challenges of climate change (and the no less imperiling situation of biodiversity destruction), it is necessary to imagine the human, and the organism, as ecologies within ecologies, or ponds among ponds.

Central to the exhibition, in its performance-installation, Brussels-based Agency calls forth gatherings and discussion around controversial intellectual property cases, raising questions such as: are living things patentable subject matter? A video by Maximilian Prüfer explores the consequences of environmental destruction upon the pollination process within agriculture, while Berlin-based artist Anne Duk Hee Jordan, in her collaboration with Pauline Doutreluingne, has developed a multimedia wedding bed installation, opening a nonlinear perspective on species migration and the botany of desire. Shanghai and Yueyang-based artist Mao Chenyu’s further invokes the figure of the agricultural worker and space-time of Chinese rural society in two films, one of which will premiere at the close of the exhibition. Extending the exhibition out into the city, walking maps designed by Zaanheh Project’s Monika Lin invite visitors to key areas around Shanghai to think with the emergent ecologies of the local watershed. Finally, the curatorial project of Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin, Reassembling the Natural, frames the exhibition, conceptually and materially, with traces of Lynn Margulis and her collaborators, including a documentary film directed by John Feldman exploring her life and ideas.