On view February 13–26
Schafer Gallery | Outside Wall, SFAI—Fort Mason Campus (Pier 2)
Opening Reception: Friday, February 14 | 4:30pm
From wars to water, the world is torn between people fighting among themselves and against their environment. Immigration crisis is the hallmark of an impending natural resource scarcity. Masses are stampeding to get to a better side of the world as borders are being raised in the name of sovereignty. Living ecosystems are abused and contaminated under the expense of military development. Most of us seem to recognize that the only way to get through this is to work together, yet it seems like the world is only drifting further and further apart from one crisis to the next as we become stirred between facts and fiction; between scientific tyranny and nonsensical causal inferences. Our population swells and we creep over the earth as a hyper-industrial, capitalist machine; leaving trails of irreversible damage and suffering.
As our world begins to end, we’re asked to picture a world that exists beyond the scope of historical sensibilities. If perhaps, there is some immaterial part of us that cannot disappear, this part of us is what links us to the afterlife. If there’s something in our composition that prevails beyond a life lived between reincarnations of dust and stars - the insight of a universal flow between all that is eternal gives us a sense of spirituality. Within the cavities of human knowledge lies a world of endless possibilities. While it can be a fertile ground for our imaginations, to grapple with this void is to grapple with death itself.
D-ARK is an ongoing inter-medium art project undertaken by Christian Tan. Its core mission is to engage the public and institutional bodies, in existential contemplation. To think about the marks that will be left behind by human beings as individuals and as a species while we come to face one another in the brink of our extinction.
Participating Artists: D-ARK
Curated by Christian Tan
Image: D-ARK, Tower, 2020; Physarum Polycephalum, Agar, Plastic, Wood, Death and Decay. Courtesy the artist.
