Dissolving Earths

Online exhibition
al-yené, Bo Choy, Shezad Dawood, Daisy Hildyard, Maya Kust, Lukáš Likavčan, Natalia Papaeva and Himali Singh Soin. With Carolina Caycedo, Sayana Namsaraeva, Astrida Neimanis, Elizabeth Povinelli, Rodion Sulyandziga and Nikita Tananaev.

Dissolving Earths is an online programme of new artist commissions, texts and podcasts that seek new dialogues with our geological pasts. It explores the vast expanse of the Siberian permafrost landscape; a thriving ecosystem, teaming with life, mythology, histories and futures, hidden just below the surface. 

These frozen soils, some of which are hundreds of thousands of years old, are a place where the suspended lives of the deep past merge with the present as they are exposed by the thaw. Organic and non-organic matter from different millennia meet; a glitch in perceptions of linear histories. As this happens, new futures are put in motion for both human and non-human communities, locally and across the planet.

Dissolving Earths emerged out of shared conversations between artists, writers, ecologists, geographers, hydrologists, anthropologists, astronomers, shamans, and others—both whose lives and work are embedded in the Siberian permafrost regions and those tracing their implicated relationship from afar.

Engaging with the differing worldviews that have emerged from the languages and cosmologies indigenous to these disparate landscapes, the programme delves into the punctured surface of thermokarst pools, the organic biomes suspended in the frozen soil below the tundra, and into the depths of the sacred Lake Baikal. Conversations and collaborations explore the terrifying chasms of the Batagaika crater, which open up a ‘mouth to the underworld’; ancient creatures of the deep past which are exposed as the permafrost thaws; and the rewilding project Pleistocene Park which seeks to recreate the mammoth steppe from 12,000 years ago.

Dissolving Earths considers our personal and collective imprint on this precarious and vital landscape, whose rapidly changing environment plays a seismic role not just for the people of Siberia, but for the future of the ecology of our planet. Bringing together diverse scientific, artistic, and indigenous knowledge, Dissolving Earths addresses these subterranean environments and the stories they hold: past, present, and future.

Dissolving Earths is curated by Sophie J Williamson. Curatorial team Yulia Gromova and Timur Zolotoev.

Dissolving Earths is a project by Undead Matter, and released in partnership with the Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam), TBA21 (Madrid), documenta Institut (Kassel) and Mimosa House (London).

Visit the online exhibition at dissolving.earth.