November 13 – December 12, 2015
Opening Reception Friday, November 13, 2015
Actual Contemporary / 300 Ross Avenue
Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 12 – 5
The Age of Catastrophe is an exploration of the insights art can provide in the face of the accelerating series of natural and manufactured catastrophes – environmental, technological, economic, social, political – that characterize the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As the natural and the technological become increasingly indistinguishable, e.g., the 2011 earthquake off of the east coast of Japan precipitating the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown, in the figure of catastrophe, does art provide a premonitory means of imagining/imaging the worst case scenario? Does art address itself to or embody an apparent will-to-catastrophe that expresses itself globally? Does art (re)capture a speculative opportunity for a (re)consideration of the relations between humanity, technology and the environment? Or does art provide a navigational affordance by which to plot a movement through a catastrophic topology?
Curated by Dr. Melentie Pandilovski (Director, Video Pool Media Arts Centre) and Tom Kohut (independent critic, theorist and curator), The Age of Catastrophe brings together new media artists from Canada, Europe, Mexico and Australia to consider: the realization and analysis of dynamic systems; the cultural reverberations of historical trauma; spectrality and hyperstition as imaginative projection; biopower and biopolitics; the apocalyptic sublime; and artistic action in concrete political struggle. Using audiovisual installation, interactive electronics, robotics, 3D modeling, augmented reality and prototype quantum computing, the artists in this exhibition explore, embody and intervene in the before, during and after of the catastrophic event.
The artists exhibiting in The Age of Catastrophe are: Kelly Jaclynn Andres (Montreal); Rick Fisher & Don Rice (Winnipeg); Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (Montreal); Andrew John Milne (Winnipeg); Catherine Richards (Ottawa); Kelly Richardson (Newcastle, UK); David Rokeby (Toronto); Michelle Teran (Berlin); Jane Tingley (Kitchener/Waterloo); Paul Thomas & Kevin Raxworthy (Sydney, AU) and Bill Vorn (Montreal).