Taking its departure from a poem by Senegalese poet Birago Diop, titled Les Souffles (1960), this exhibition chapter invites us to embrace elemental thinking, or to quote Diop, to “Listen to things / More often than beings / Hear the voice of fire / Hear the voice of water / Listen in the wind / To the sighs of the bush / This is the ancestors breathing”. It connects soil, stones, steel, and souls within one single energy field.
Fundamental to the thinking of artists Ana Mendieta or Laura Grisi, the programme explores the possibility of oneness. It reverts to Giordano Bruno’s Concerning the Cause, Principle, and One, which states that “the Universe is one, infinite, immobile. The absolute potential is one, the act is one, the form or soul is one, the material or body is one, the thing is one, the being in one, one is the maximum and the best… It is not generated, because there is no other being it could desire or hope for, since it comprises all beings.” It sets up a conversation between four works by female artists centered on the relationship between the body and the four elements – earth, fire, air, and water – and matter. In so doing, it invites a broader reflection upon regenerative cycles.
Program:
Sojung Jun and Jungju An,Ghost Forest Flower, 2022, 30 min
