Institute for provocation cordially invites you to attend Hanna Husberg’s solo project Often people ask how birds are affected by the air this Friday.
At the intersection of philosophy, politics, science and lived experience,‘Often people ask how birds are affected by the air’ looks at how air, that is unruly when it comes to borders, functions in the human imagination. As it mutates and migrates, is the experience of air translateable, measurable?
Addressing the cultural and political aspects of urban air Husberg’s work builds upon her 3-month residency at IFP last autumn, during which her main practice was to talk and listen to locals, collecting their imaginaries of urban air. Narratives and imaginaries refer to the social domain of seeing, experiencing, thinking, fantasising, discussing and enacting aspect of the material world. Imaginaries are processes of negotiating claims to knowledge and truth. They are transformational, and enable new ways of knowing and acting in the world.
Because of its invisibility air is mostly mediated through scientific instruments and measurements, and through language. In China the introduction of the new concept of ‘wumai’, and the successive datafication of air, as air became “this number PM 2,5”, have produced a different augmented air, affecting ways in which air is experienced.
Drawing on her experience from Beijing, on the interviews and dialogues she had throughout this period, on existing aerial imaginaries and new technoscientific representations, Husberg has conceived an audiovisual installation that engages with the materiality of air. A soundscape that evokes the colours used to indicate the Air Quality Index, and the related presence of solid matter in the air, fills the space using the aerial media it explores. The visual elements of the installation draw forth the materiality of existing aerial imaginaries, but also function as light sources, and as token summoning the translations and variations taking place between spoken versus written language, and between cultures.
On October 29th at 17h a panel discussion with invited guests will be held at the IFP. It will address cultural and political aspects of urban air, with a focus on the perceptibility of air and its pollution, on agency and response-ability, and on environmental imaginaries. The panel includes Agata Marzecova, Lulu Li, Veronica Sun, Hanna Sahlberg and Guo Hao.
Time and Location 2017.10.27 - 2017.11.05 Opening party: 27th October 5:00 PM Institute for Provocation @ Black Sesame Projecrt Space Heizhima Hutong 13, Dongcheng District, Beijing
About the artist
Hanna Husberg (b. Finland) is a Stockholm based artist. She graduated from ENSB-A, Paris in 2007, and is currently a Phd in Practice candidate at the academy of fine arts Vienna. Through a practice of audiovisual and installation projects she investigates how we perceive, and relate to our environment in times of anthropogenic climate change. Together with Laura McLean she conceived the Contingent Movements Archive and Symposium (Maldives Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale / Adapting in the Anthropocene, UNESCO, Paris) Other recent projects includeHuman Meteorology (Galleri Mejan, Stockholm / Chateau de Chamarande) and Being with (CEEAC, Strasbourg). Hanna is also a participant of Frontiers in Retreat, a research platform in Multidisciplinary Approaches to Ecology in Contemporary Art coordinated by HIAP, Helsinki, and HYBRID MATTERs, an art & science network program which investigates the convergence of the physical and digital world into a hybrid ecology.