Multispecies Clouds

Participating artists: Carolina Caycedo & David de Rozas, Sergio Rojas Chaves, Sheryl Cheung, Rometti Costales, Patricia Domínguez, Jes Fan, Fei Yining, Liu Chuang, Long Pan, Uriel Orlow, Rice Brewing Sisters Club, Pamela Rosenkranz, Yi Xin Tong, Wu Chi-Yu, Trevor Yeung, Zhang Wenzhi, Zheng Mahler

Curator: Yang Beichen

Multispecies Clouds marks the first chapter of a three-part research-based curatorial project, “Who Owns Nature?” forthcoming at the Macalline Art Center. In this exhibition, we seek to present a metaphor for new interspecies relationships, which on the one hand, point to the networked structure of different life forms and, on the other hand, involve a global system of exchange, within which species in the Anthropocene move about through information, material, and energy. Within the “clouds”, the boundaries of species blur, effacing the distinction between the center and the periphery; hence their “identities” constantly intermingle, reshape and transform, and this interweaving process gradually evolves into a sprawling and vast open world.

Although humans often intervene on the boundary, these creative agents have their way of responding—like “the multitude” they continue to encounter, co-evolve with, align with, and confront us, sometimes intimately, other times at a distance. As anthropologist Celia Lowe notes, “Our futures lie at the junctures where forms of the human, animal, and microbe meet and where each sustains—and clouds—the limits and possibilities of the other.” Each species carries its cosmological model that transcends the limits of the senses, perceptions, and bodies, mixing organic and inorganic narratives and ultimately arriving at the metaphorical realm of animism.

The artists of Multispecies Clouds act as integrals of multispecies ethnographers and shamans who re-build these cosmological models through their interactions with plants, animals, viruses, microbes, and fungi and translating them into images, poetry, and politics. The ecstasy and illusion in Multispecies Clouds symbolize the vitality of life, implying that we hear the call of a Multiverse and respond with emotion and imagination. Here brews the sophisticated and dense“sympoietics”, which no longer focuses aesthetic attention only on what is usually considered “glamorous” but instead discovers, through visible and perceptible forms, those forms of life that are forgotten or obscured, or “translate” the stories between species, as what the tribal shamans once undertook—conjuring the energy of art here.

Multispecies Clouds is curated by Yang Beichen, director of Macalline Art Center, and presented by Huang Wenlong and the Exhibition and Research Department. 

Special public program: Meshwork
“Meshwork” is a special public program throughout the course of Multispecies Clouds, consisting of forums, lectures, conversations, podcasts, screenings and book clubs. “The metaphor of “meshwork” refers to how individuals and knowledges are entanglements; they emerge through encounters with others—as “lines of becoming,” they are not pre-existent, self-contained and separate entities.”(Tim Ingold) As Ingold points out, this notion describes how we build connections through encounters and contacts, and thus form the intersecting courses of action in personal, intellectual, and interdisciplinary research activities. Like Multispecies Clouds, “Meshwork” as a metaphor is also a way of “storytelling,” a way of unfolding the emergent, the fluid, the contingent, the historical, and the narrative “lines of becoming”. We will invite practitioners from various fields to participate in this “entanglement” and to work together to create new indeterminate networks. 

About Macalline Art Center
Macalline Art Center’s physical space in Beijing’s 798 Art District has formally opened to the public on January 15, 2022. Macalline Art Center is a non-profit art institution founded by philanthropist Che Xuanqiao and supported by the Red Star Macalline Holding Group Co., Ltd. Based in a 900-square-meter, two-story building, Macalline Art Center will bring together artists, curators, and cultural professionals from around the world working in a range of forms. The Center will build a practice-oriented site focused on contemporary visual inventions and become a new cultural coordinate on the contemporary art map.