Elemental Constellations

Participating artists: Syahrul Anuar, Ursula Biemann & Mo Diener, Julian Charrière, Ane Graff, Guo Cheng, Louis Henderson, Chia-Wei Hsu, Hanna Ljungh, Otobong Nkanga, Alain Resnais, Riar Rizaldi, Oscar Santillán, Maarten Vanden Eynde & Musasa, Wang Sishun, Zhan Wang

Curator: Yang Beichen

“Who Owns Nature?” is a research-based curatorial project with three chapters at the Macalline Center of Art. The first chapter, Multispecies Clouds, has already taken place in the first half of this year. Elemental Constellations marks the second chapter of the series. As we all know, elements are the fundamental units of the world, serving as the basis of all things and life. However, they have also come to symbolize an intangible “nature”, or a certain kind of mythological and magical “science”. Elements may be seen as a “medium” from such perspective, constantly shaping the technology, whether in the time of Empedocles or Taoism, or after the periodic table having been established. Within the framework of New Materialism, “the elements are as restless as the human imagination,” as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen notes. This restlessness is not only rooted in chemical or industrial processes but also tied to various alternative ontologies and cosmologies from the pre-Socratic period to the modern age.

In the era of ecological crisis, we are noticing the dynamic entanglements between seemingly separate entities, and many of these once invisible connections can be traced back to the elemental level. Passive, inert, and non-intervening elements are at the same time active, vibrant, and even destructive. As a machine that mixes object, body, and power, elements transcend various entities, from the inorganic to the organic, from the environment to life, from nature to discourse. The world under such influence is presented as a material assemblage constantly being reconstructed. It is in this context that we, as humans in the Anthropocene, can finally contemplate our embeddedness in the planetary ecology and the possibility of forming alliances with the elements.

Inspired by Primo Levi’s novel The Periodic Table, we seek to activate the narrative and material imagination of elements in the exhibition Elemental Constellations, creating their images and sensory values, and thus constructing an alchemical constellation. Continuing the reflection on species in Multispecies Clouds, the first chapter of the exhibition series “Who Owns Nature?”, we hope to define the element as an indeterminate, unpredictable, and ever evolving being, not external but intrinsic to us. The exhibition is akin to a “parliament” as described by Bruno Latour, an assembly between humans and non-humans, a debate between different cosmologies. As nature gradually reduces to lifeless resources due to colonialism and extractivism, we, in the name of “elemental poetics”, attempt to reinvent the emotions and justice related to water, fire, land, and minerals. 

Elemental Constellations is curated by Yang Beichen, the Director of MACA, and co-presented by Huang Wenlong, the Curator of MACA, with support from MACA’s Department of Exhibitions and Research.

About Macalline Center of Art 
Macalline Center of Art (MACA) is a non-profit art institution devoted to contemporary visual inventions. The Center engages with artists and art groups by building offline and online communities through events and research. Housed in a 900-square-meter, two-story building in Beijing’s 798 Art District, MACA brings together artists, curators, and pan-cultural professionals from around the world, building a practice-oriented field for visual inventions with various forms of persistent co-working and becoming a new cultural coordinate on the contemporary art map. MACA is founded by philanthropist and art patron Che Xuanqiao, and supported by the Red Star Macalline Holding Group Co., Ltd.