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Cosmic Alreadymades: Exhibiting Indifference at dOCUMENTA (13)
- Source: Journal of Curatorial Studies, Volume 3, Issue 1, Mar 2014, p. 98 - 116
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- 01 Mar 2014
Abstract
Departing from the proposal by curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev to ‘see from the point of view of the meteorite’ at dOCUMENTA (13), this article analyzes the exhibition’s claim to non-anthropocentric knowledge production through the paradoxical staging of a form that re-prioritizes human experience. It focuses on two works: Pierre Huyghe’s Untilled (2012), which coalesces an affect of indifference to the centrality of human experience; and Guillermo Faivovich and Nicolas Goldberg’s El Chaco (2012), which sets inexperiencable timescales under contemporary exhibition conditions. Both works open political questions through complicity with material processes. At the same time, they point to potentials and limitations for the methodology of the ‘alreadymade’, understood here in terms of the staging of non-human timescales for human participants, and the making affordable of systemic threat.