COLOGNE.- Unknown Affinities by Dane Mitchell might be considered the first wing of The Museum of Without — a museum of proxies and gaps — an unhinged museum held together by its hermeneutical framing practices alone. This enormous and ambitious project directly displays techniques of enclosure and addresses the museum’s grasp of its artifacts and actively asks: what might a museum without artifacts be? What might a collection of losses hold and what might hold it?
The installation presents a sketch of such absences. It is a scattered monument of mounts, or armatures, each made to scale, to grasp every known extinct Aotearoa New Zealand bird species; holotype, fossil, and full skeletal remains alike. Through this apparatus, which underwrites containment and reveals the museum as a place that presupposes the absence of what it aims to hold, keep and ‘safeguard’, we might imagine the potentiality of something being full of things at the same time as it is emptied.
Unknown Affinities comprises two distinct elements: one is part of an ongoing investigation into things that contain, such as museums, encyclopedias, and lists and that which cannot be contained, such as vapors, spirit, contagions, and, transmissions (of archival recordings of birdsong of now extinct species across FM bandwidth) and eradications (scaffold mounts to grasp that which is gone). Occupying the entire gallery floor space, Unknown Affinities presents itself to us in a full state of absent-hood and reminds us that all things are in constant movement and that all things are migratory and transitory, leaving nothing left to grasp.
Unknown Affinities is on view through September 10th at Two Rooms in Auckland, New Zealand.
Two Rooms has commissioned an eshttps://tworooms.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/mounting-extinction-unknown-affinities-stephen-turner-2022.pdf" target="_blank">view here.
Dane Mitchell's Post hoc joins the permanent collection at Skulpturenpark Köln in Köln, Germany.
Dane Mitchell is interested in things that no longer exist. His tree-like radio masts transmit lists compiled by the artist of lost and extinct entities. The lists are enumerated by an electronic voice and are transmitted by two antennae hidden in artificial trees, normally employed to conceal telecommunications infrastructure. Post hoc highlights the implications associated with loss and extinction.
ÜberNatur marks the 10th iteration of the biannual KölnSkulptur exhibition of contemporary outdoor sculpture. Eight new works have been added to the Skulpturenpark Köln this year. Inspired by the location of the public park—wedged between the Rhine, the Cologne Zoo, the Flora, and the adjacent Botanical Garden—artworks were selected that engage with notions of nature, and initiate dialogue with the natural environment.
KölnSkulptur #10 opens amid a devastating global pandemic, triggered by a rare spillover of a virus from wild animals to humans. Facilitated by ever-closer connections between disparate parts of the world as a result of globalization, the virus has rampaged like wildfire across the planet, infecting millions of people.
The ‘new normal’ created by this global pandemic is causing us to view the world from novel perspectives; art and exhibitions of art are not exempt from such new interrogations. It is now of the utmost urgency that we raise awareness of the network of interconnections between striving for economic growth and globalization and the devastating impact these can have on our natural environment. At the same time, we must not forget the visionary power of art and its ability to forge new ideas and sense-forms – not to mention its ability to refer to the ineffable beyond the relentless logic of utility and human efficiency.
Size does not define the significance of sculptural work. Sometimes small gestures can have a large impact, as can be seen in the current pandemic. Some of the works shown at KölnSkulptur #10 diverge from the expected scale of outdoor sculpture. Smaller and often barely perceptible pieces allow visitors to engage with the world at a microcosmic level, but also to widen their focus out to the larger, more unpredictable, macrocosm, in which we live.
ÜberNatur questions the monumentality of outdoor sculptures. The exhibition thus oscillates between the smallest work by Ayşe Erkmen and the largest by Dane Mitchell. Erkmen’s contribution consists of a replica of Lonely George, a Hawaiian tree snail, the last of its species, which died in 2019 after scientists spent fourteen years unsuccessfully trying to find it a mate. Mitchell’s work features two artificial trees designed to camouflage mobile data antennae and surveillance equipment, originally mass-produced in China. This piece has been imported for KölnSkulptur #10 from last year’s Venice Biennale, where it was exhibited in the context of New Zealand’s national pavilion.
At KölnSkulptur #10, visitors will encounter works that touch upon fundamental issues of birth, emergence, growth and decay, works that address both the microcosmic and macrocosmic levels of existence and that weave together diverse viewpoints to create complex connections – allowing us to sense and think with, and beyond, nature.
Tobias Berger
Curator KölnSkulptur #10
