Living Content: The exhibition, with 34 artists and around 100 works, is divided into 4 chapters: “All Is Connected,” “Return to Earth,” “The Great Acceleration,” and “The Future Is Within Us,”. Can you briefly explain how you arrived at structuring the exhibition in this way? What has been your strategy to navigate between the global and the local, and between the different kinds of temporalities and art historical contexts?
Martin Germann: What we call today a "global“ environmental crisis has started in countless localities around the world, especially in so-called "developed“, or rather, "industrialized“ countries. With that in mind, we were drafting our show in combining works of artists who started their career in the 1950s or 1960s, such as Agnes Denes, Ana Mendieta, Cecilia Vicuña, Hans Haacke, or Yutaka Matsuzawa with that of other generations of contemporary artists - to have voices from a moment when pollution became an issue, also as part of the peace- and environmental movement - which, again, is connected to a lot of continental shifts in the art of that time, when for example Conceptual Art was disrupting the old order of painting and sculpture. Today, artists are operating are on a global scale, and we brought a lot of artists to Japan to develop works which - tracing the ways the environmental crisis took - connect the situation in Japan with that of the world, just take the work by Nina Canell, where people walk over shells which later become cement, Monira Al-Qadiri’s new installation which tells the story of disturbance in natural ecosystems from the perspective of shells, or Daniel Turner, who burnishes a copper barometer in the walls of the museum which he sourced on a toxic Japanese chemical tanker which is currently dismantled in the world’s largest ship-breaking yeard in in Alang in India.
At the same time, in the last chapter we confront artists such as Sheronoawe Hakihiiwe, whose work on paper save indigenous environmental knowledge, or Martha Atienza, who works with Fisherfolks in the Philippines in saving their fishing grounds and their habitat at the coast-lines, which are threatened by commercial „development“ activities with pieces by Ian Cheng or Pierre Huyghe which question in how far technologies, in that case the highly discussed AI, could help out of the impasse. In that sense, the show is also a rendez-vous of Post-Colonial and Post-Human questions, confronting issues of the West with that of the Global South which, to bring together is one of this time’s challenges. The show is a constant navigation between doubt and hope, but above all intends to show the work of great artists - and the case, that Mori Art Museum itself is part of larger circulations which interfere in the rhythms of the planet.
Living Content: The chapter “Return to Earth” was guest-curated by Bert Winther-Tamaki: art historian, writer, and professor at the University of California, whose research focus is Modern and Contemporary Japanese Art and Visual Culture, as well as Ecocriticism. Using publications, archives, and video documentation of performances from the 70s and 80s, this chapter anchors the larger exhibition in a very specific geo-political and historical context. What are some of your favorite parts in this section that you feel bridge nicely with the contemporary works in the larger exhibition?
Martin Germann: The idea was to zoom in at one particular point in the show - also considering the fact that the museum is in the 53rd floor with an amazingly sublime outlook - a position, which sometimes hinders to look on the immediate ground, or, the own history one is entangled with. And yes, there are so many amazing works, just take the film of a groundbreaking artist such as Fujiko Nakaya, who in the early 1970s used the then-new medium video to give the so-called „Friends of Minamata“, victims of a mercury-poisoning catastrophe a voice, or take Tetsumi Kudo’s dark-humorous work pretending a world without human beings - which anyway comes at some point in time - but the work of Kudo looks so fresh and contemporary… A work I also particularly love is the new installation by Ikebana artist Gaho Taniguchi, who built a bell-alike sprouting installation overlooking Tokyo. Basically, that chapter shows us that we should have listened more often to artists, who gave signs of warning from early on. The over-used metaphor of the „canary in the coalmine“ has its true meaning here. However, we see our „regional environmental art history“ also as a role-model other areas would like to explore as well. While Japanese don’t have the urgent need to be always the first, this case here could serve as a paradigm.
Living Content: There is an interest right now in exhibition-making that focuses on environmental issues. How do you feel that this 'discourse' is shifting how curators and artists think about the art world and its role?
Martin Germann: Of course it is a big theme, but everywhere on this planet discussed in different intensities, and topics, because of the themes many connections with questions of Colonialism, Economy, … the environmental issue is somewhat a burning glass in which all other discourses melt, which makes it quite interesting. Since I cannot talk so much about the art world as a whole, I can say that we try to create space for artists and their amazing ideas, and also our show hopefully gives tribute to the fact that we should listen more often to artists, who are capable to produce that kind knowledge and perspective with which we can develop - to give an example- a non-violent relation with technology, just to give one example, which includes the perspectives of non-human beings and other species living here.
Our Ecology: Toward a Planetary Living is curated by Martin Germann.
ARTISTS: Nina Canell, Hans Haacke, Jochen Lempert, Emilija Škarnulytė, Cecilia Vicuña, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Fujita Akiko, Katsura Yuki, Kimura Tsunehisa, Koie Ryoji, Kudo Tetsumi, Muraoka Saburo, Nagasawa Nobuho, Nakanishi Natsuyuki, Nakaya Fujiko, Okamoto Taro, Taniguchi Gaho , Tonoshiki Tadashi, Monira Al Qadiri, Julian Charrière, Ali Cherri, Daniel Turner, Yasura Takeshi, Martha Atienza, Ian Cheng, Agnes Denes, Jef Geys, Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Pierre Huyghe, Matsuzawa Yutaka, Ana Mendieta, Kate Newby, Asad Raza, Saijo Akane
Martin Germann is an author and curator, living and working in Cologne/Germany. In 2021, he has been appointed as Adjunct Curator for Mori Art Museum, where he recently organized “Our Ecology: Toward A Planetary Living”, the second group exhibition for the museum’s 20th anniversary, as well as co-curated the first one entitled “World Classroom”, an exhibition devoted to the role of art as a tool for Learning. Before he organized MAM Screen 017: Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson (2022). He also served as Curatorial Advisor at Aichi Triennale 2022. Other recent shows include Oliver Laric: Exoskeleton (OCAT Shanghai), 2022, Thomas Ruff: after.images at NTMoFA Taichung, Taiwan (2021), as well as Another Energy: Power to Continue Challenging – 16 Women Artists from around the World at Mori Art Museum, together with Mami Kataoka (2021). From 2012-2019 he was leading the artistic department at S.M.A.K. (Ghent, Belgium) where he organized collection and thematic presentations as well as solo shows with Raoul De Keyser, Zhang Peili, Hiwa K, Gerhard Richter, Michael E. Smith, James Welling, Nairy Baghramian, Lee Kit, Kasper Bosmans, Michael Buthe, Jordan Wolfson, Rachel Harrison, among others. Earlier he was curator of Kestner Gesellschaft Hannover (2008-2012) and directed the program of the "Gagosian Gallery, Berlin" for the 4th Berlin Biennale (2005-2006). He has published numerous exhibition catalogues and monographs, his texts have appeared in magazines such as 032c, Frieze and Mousse. For Lili Dujourie: Folds in Time he received an AICA award for Belgium’s best exhibition in 2016.
