Supersensible——超越人之感 2023
Digital Art Centre Taipei
Anchi Lin, Hideki Umezawa and Koichi Sato, Pam Virada, Pony Express
Performance by Yening
Screening by Lololol
Co-curated by 張睿紘 Jui Hung Chang, Rebecca Jensen, Pimpakaporn Pornpeng and Cynthia Rakotoarisoa
From the worldview of the anthropocene, humans and the non-human rest of the world are placed in opposition, generating a binary which is too often seen as a simplistic exclusion. By reducing everything beyond ourselves to an outline, this binary suppresses the breadth of exchange and dialogue we have the potential to manifest. Indiscriminately referring to nascent technologies like AI, natural forces and organic matter, the ‘non-human’ tells us nothing, except about ourselves. By exploring multispecies perspectives however, we are challenged to consider whether the human gaze can ever move away from its centrism towards a more inclusive worldview, rich with interspecies empathy. Curiosity animates us; can we co-exist and form intimacy if we fail to acknowledge the full diversity of non-human beings? Pursuing this intimacy calls for a more complex imagining of care, it demands a deconstruction of care as it pervades relationships between humans and non-humans. Can we move past viewing care as necessary, as wanted, as positive? Can we decenter the experience of caring from the human to the non-human and envision death, decay, pleasure and pain all as alternate figurations of care? Within this exhibition, water and wind energetically collaborate with female bodies to form resistance. Virtual terra of woven textiles allows queer indigenous bodies to hold space for real terra dispossessed. Stained and burdened ecologies are distilled and packaged as consumer goods, while eroticism is embraced as means to deeply root our connection to the terra.
No single crisp, clean understanding of how to foster intimacy across species arises. Rather, each work, borne of its local context, is embedded with its own specificity. The common thread is sensory stimulus. Viewing, touching, tasting, smelling and hearing rouse the sensorium rooted in every organism and allows interpretation across species. Though we cannot remove the potential for misinterpretation, our senses offer new ground to cultivate intimacy beyond human language. Without tendering answers, we can at least begin to question; how can we use our senses, not only sight, to enlarge the idea of care and come closer to the non-human?
Using the word ‘supersensible’ to frame this exhibition betrays the fraught practice of trying to understand something which can never be wholly understood from a human perspective. In our desire for intimacy with the supersensible, the title also acknowledges that any connection we might hope to foster with the non-human must recruit the full capacity of our senses, and 超越人之感 hints at any possibility to surpass human senses, to push beyond human capabilities, perhaps getting close to non-human beings’ sensoriums. Distilling English and Mandarin together, the title highlights the diversity of the human species, who within themselves erect barriers through language which can only be breached by the advent of our other senses.