DANCING WITH ALL: The Ecology of Empathy

Exhibiting artists: Maria Fernanda Cardoso, Kuniko Donen, Formafantasma, AKI INOMATA, Eva Jospin, Kapwani Kiwanga, Stefano Mancuso, Otobong Nkanga, PNAT, Rediscover project, Adrián Villar Rojas, K. Sato + H. Umezawa, Søren Solkær, Jaider Esbell, Joseca Yanomami and more

DANCING WITH ALL: The Ecology of Empathy—an exhibition that represents a revolutionary conception of ecology, forging a path that diverges dramatically from the direction in which we were previously headed—is being held at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa to commemorate the 20th anniversary of its opening.

This exhibition showcases the resilience of art to the damage caused by the Noto Peninsula earthquake on January 1, 2024. The circular museum building by SANAA is an amalgam of artworks that resemble a living organism, incorporating the audience within it as a place that repeatedly contracts and expands, a site for the production of empathetic experience and knowledge.

The objective of this exhibition is not to atone or repent for the Anthropocene, or devote ourselves to emphasizing our differences and specificities as a result of research and observation. Rather, it seeks to explore what we have in common, or how we can experience a sense of resonance and empathy. The act of showcasing interspecies communication, environmental destruction, and social fragmentation through a platform that operates to share these phenomena, visualize them, sensitize us to them, and elicit an empathetic response from us is no easy task. It demands collaboration between scientists and anthropologists, and a masterful grasp of transitions by artists whose work imbues the digital with material form.

It is based on the hypothesis that human beings, as a biologically vulnerable species, have survived for tens of thousands of years only because of dance, which shares a sense of both rhythm and resonance.

Guest curator Emanuele Coccia’s idea of “métamorphoses” as corridors that allow two creatures to cohabit without mixing completely alludes to the shift from the “illusion of community” to the “reality of cohabitation” that lies beyond interspecies communication. This exhibition, centered on the theme of dance, is composed of four elements: 1) translations of nature; 2) collaborations between nature and humans; 3) transitions of material; and 4) the enchantment of material.

PNAT (Project Nature), led by Dr. Stefano Mancuso, a specialist in plant neurobiology research, performs translations of nature by sensing bio-signals from a 1000-year-old sacred tree and transforms them into light waves. Aki Inomata, whose practice centers on collaborations between nature and humans, enlarges pieces of wood gnawed by beavers and displays them as sculptures that reference Brancusi. Resonating with the theme of transitions of material, an enlarged, hand-painted copy of an original painting of Madonna del Parto by Piero della Francesca is attached to the ceiling, exposed after its glass collapsed in an earthquake, as if to put it into a state of repose. Below it is a digital sculpture by Adrián Villar Rojas downloaded into reality that looks up at the Virgin in a kind of symbolic contrast between the digital and the analog-physical, performing a dance on a monumental scale. Rediscover project invites us to discover the enchantment of material, creating new forms from broken pottery shattered by the earthquake in collaboration with craftspeople affected by the disaster.

Also featured are more than 50 participating artists from the indigenous peoples of the Amazon, where there is no dichotomy between nature and man, and where everything is considered to belong to the realm of the human.

This exhibition hopes to serve as a site of preparation for an uncertain future: where contemporary art museums might become a new type of school for both learning and sensuous pleasure, where various forms of cross-disciplinary knowledge come together. Through the diversity of mediums found in contemporary art and sensory learning, we become able to cultivate independent corpuses of knowledge about the future, and develop them into shared wisdom.

Catalog information: Seigen sha Planned for publication at the end of March

Exhibition Chief Curator: Yuko Hasegawa
Guest Curator: Emanuele Coccia
Co-curator: Ayumi Ikeda, Jin Motohashi