NEW YORK, NY.- The experience of sentience—a word deriving from the Latin root word “sentire,” which means to perceive or feel—is to be aware of our own existence through our five senses. It is often thought of as the dividing line between human and artificial intelligence. Our innate ability to perceive, feel, and understand through our eyes, ears, mouth, nose, and skin places us in a feedback loop with the world, enabling us to experience and co-create reality as we know it. Common Sentience looks at the properties of the sensory faculties—essentially human “technology”—and how they connect humans, animals, plants, and planets in ways that we have yet to fully understand. In light of anxieties about AI’s capacity to acquire sentience, this exhibition asks us to first look inward: how might we better comprehend our own sensory mechanisms, which author Michael Serres describes as “the real interdisciplinarity of the body?” What is the intelligence of the sensorial realm and how does it operate relationally between human bodies and the rest of the natural world?

Renowned feminist quantum physicist Karen Barad posits that we are porous beings engaged in an active web of interrelations, or “intra-actions,” that form a relational quality between things. In this web of connective tissue, she points to the possibilities of a collective intelligence. In contrast to AI, the sensory information we absorb and filter is shared with the “umwelt” of other sentient beings (plants, animals, microbes) and keeps us intertwined in invisible but significant ways.

What clues might this kind of “enmeshment” provide for other, potentially more advanced ways of being, learning and communicating—modes of being from which the pace of contemporary life alienates us? And how might we better comprehend our sentience within a network of interrelations, rather than as an egoistic singularity that reenforces humanity’s domination of nature?

The works brought together in Common Sentience share this connection to “sentire,” also encompassing sense, sentiment, sensuality, sensitivity, sentience, even the antonym nonsense. The collection of video, glass, brass, watercolor, fingernails, light-sensitive paper, resin, linen, scent, sound, flora, sunlight, and paint asks us to consider how our senses intermingle with other networks of sentience, articulating narratives of sensory-related mythologies and connecting us to ancestral realms of signification.

ARTISTS ON VIEW

Janine Antoni

The exhibition includes “Mortle + Pestle,” a 1990s work in which the artist’s tongue touches the eyeball of her partner. This work can be read as a phantom limb for the entire show, in that the photograph elicits such a strong response within our own sensing system. Antoni’s investigation of the body and the sense of touch has manifested performatively and sculpturally over several decades. “Behold,” 2014, an object meant to be held and caressed, is available by request at the front desk.

Daniel Bozhkov

Daniel Bozhkov’s multivalent work encompasses scientific inquiry and absurdist tactics towards new ways to absorb and experience sensorial information. “Nepotism Project Projected Evidence of Special Privileges in Alternative Controlled Environments,” Bozhkov’s site-specific window project and mural, features two French marigolds under grow light, each with a custom sound treatment. The work references an early 1970s experiment that exposed plants to sound and music and tracked their growth or decay. Adjacent to this work, Bozhkov exhibits a painted sundial that tracks the real-time movements of the sun’s rays into the gallery space.

Zana Briski

For nearly three decades Zana Briski has been patiently waiting in dark forests and jungles to commune and collaborate with animals. As a trained biologist and practicing Buddhist she learned early on to be patient while studying nocturnal animals in the jungles of Borneo and to develop, one might say, her sixth sense. Briski’s artistic process evolved into unique photograms—camera-less images in which light-sensitive paper preserves a momentary encounter between beings in a common, intimate space. Shown here is an early work with Mantis, one of many in a growing series which now includes large animals such as grizzly bears. As she describes her process, “[o]nce the paper is in position, I sit in the dark and wait for an animal to pass by. Sometimes I wait night after night. I do not hide and I am in full view of the animal.”

Juan William Chavez

“Survival Blankets” brings together natural and human-made objects that represent spiritual practices and daily life around ancestral knowledge, longing and recuperation. Drawing upon his Peruvian heritage for both form and iconography, Chavez also creates paintings of animal totems on raw linen with a cosmology that elicits a connection to animal spirits. In addition to his art practice, Chavez also runs workshops and programs within a community garden in St Louis called Decolonize Garden.

Ania Freer

In different ways, the two short films featured by Jamaican-American artist Ania Freer, “Cotton Tree” and “Shango,” portray relationships to a sentient being in the form of a tree or a river. The main characters in each film sense the presence of a beloved nature-embedded deity in their midst. Freer’s delicate films bring viewers into deeply local zones of spiritual significance in rural Jamaica. (QR CODE TO WEBSITE)

Meditation Ocean Constellation

Scuba collective Meditation Ocean Constellation presents an intentional invitation to sit and coalesce with oceanic space, based on the premise that humans are mostly made of water. Excerpted from a much longer film project called “M.O. Turtlegrass Meadow,” it documents meditation circles at the sea floor with a soundtrack crafted by invited meditator Riane Tyler called “Your Deepest Ocean Meditation.”

Goldie Poblador

Glass installation artist Goldie Poblador creates narratives that embody ancestral feminist mythologies with forms of flora and fauna from the Verde islands in the Philippines, an area currently under threat from pollution and climate crisis. The ongoing series, titled “Rise of the Medusa,” encompasses hybrid forms of goddesses and plants infused with a specific scent to elicit a sense memory of place, and to represent indigenous sentient life.

Ana Prvacki

Ana Prvacki works across media to unhinge our basic “man vs nature” binary. With performance, watercolors, objects and installation, she explores how our senses inspire behaviors, desires, and fantasies and sometimes absurd scenarios. As the granddaughter of a beekeeper, she often turns her focus toward what we can sensorily understand from bees, flowers, or sea shells, and invites us to understand how our own senses provide portals for joy and ecstasy.

Miguel Sbastida

Miguel Sbastida’s work, represented here by “While I breathe and the Moon drifts away from Earth,” reflects on how the earth’s systems are mirrored in our own bodies and vice versa in both scientific and poetic ways. The work on view features clippings of the artist’s fingernails as a lunar calendar. In his own words, “approximately, fingernails grow at an average of 3.8 centimeters each year, the speed at which the plates of the North American and European continents separate every day. This is also the speed at which the Moon tirelessly drifts away from us, moving away in its gravitational spin around the Earth.”