What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

Artists: Dorota Gawęda & Eglė Kulbokaitė, Metahaven, Jenna Sutela, Zheng Mahler

Is objectivity possible, or is there no escaping our personal perspective? The exhibition What Is It Like to Be a Bat? brings together works by four artists/artist collectives who address how reality is produced. They ask about our relationship to non-human life—animals, plants, and other life forms—and they direct our attention to things in the world and science that we humans do not or cannot know or grasp.

The question of whether objectivity is possible was posed by the philosopher Thomas Nagel in his 1974 text “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”. Nagel uses bats as a metaphor in order to highlight the differences between subjective experience and objective knowledge. Even if we have researched and proven experimentally all manner of things about how bats function, such as how they orient themselves using echo location, it will, Nagel suggests, nevertheless remain impossible to grasp how a bat actually perceives its surroundings. Put differently: Experiencing a mental state is always subjective. From the contemporary perspective, Nagel’s deliberations can be read as a call to behave more respectfully and modestly toward other life forms and forms of consciousness. This constitutes the starting point for the artistic works in the exhibition. The thought experiment with the bat forges a link to contemporary approaches that, like Nagel, insist on less human-centered positions when researching sensory and subject sensations. Empathy and coexistence between species are in their focus, as we humans, facing a world on the verge of climate collapse, we require new models for the coexistence of different life forms—life that is indispensable for an intact environment.

In this matrix where insights from the natural sciences, philosophical problems, and questions of both ethics and politics mix, the artistic approaches in the exhibition can act as bridges, speculate, and research further. Alternative knowledge systems and nature provide them sources of knowledge that expand the Western, human-centered view and shed light on reality as a multiplicity of constructs. Referencing Nagel, Hong Kong artist duo Zheng Mahler explore the limits of the human apparatus and how using technology we can transpose ourselves into transitional states between human and more-than-human consciousness. While Jenna Sutela’s sculptures engage forms of intelligence that are not of human but of plant, animal and computing origin, the film Capture (2021) by Metahaven conjures up a speculative and poetic narrative along the surprising common ground between particle physics, lichens, and bats and in so doing does not exclude the big questions of philosophy, science, and everyday life. Finally, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė enquire in Mouthless Part III (2023) how climate change and technologization have influenced the representation of nature. Their landscapes are populated by complex, contradictory creatures who turn nature into a space for speculation.

Curated by Yasmin Afschar, Interim Director, Kunsthalle Mainz.

The exhibition is realized with the kind support of the Swiss cultural foundation Pro Helvetia and the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The work by Zheng Mahler was produced with the kind support of ifa—Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, in the context of the project ARE YOU FOR REAL.

Upcoming exhibitions

Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn—Other Knowledges
June 29–September 17, 2023 

The exhibition at Kunsthalle Mainz shows Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn’s (born 1881 in London; died 1962 in Ascona, Switzerland) work from a contemporary perspective. A number of contemporary artists will present their latest works alongside those of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, thus building a bridge to the present.

Sammy Baloji 
October 12, 2023–January 21, 2024

Since 2005, Sammy Baloji (born 1978 in Lubumbashi, DRC, lives and works in Brussels) has been working on the memory and history of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is closely related to Belgium’s past and present. The exhibition at Kunsthalle Mainz will account for the importance of collective aspects in his practice as a means to counter extractivist structures.