“From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked ...I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.” - Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Machines cannot make choices: they can only make decisions. Choices are something that, for now, is in the realm of the human. How do we choose the future we want to create and what choices do we need to create it? The line between utopia and dystopia is dangerously thin.
The Fig Tree explores the everyday choices and uncertain visions produced by fragile beings (humans) operating in systems of materiality and information overload. As we are more connected through ethernet cables, wires and technology, there is a pervasive disconnection from the natural world and ourselves. An ‘othering’ is taking place in the everyday and producing the ‘post-capitalist alien’.
Works in this show contemplate the idea of transhuman futures being set in an accelerated, deteriorating anthropocene. At once it is where we are heading and where we already are. The artists are met with a difficult conundrum about how to envision their life on a planet filled with so much potential yet such diminishing resources. In such critical times, how will we choose?
The Fig Tree is one part of AD Space x Tributary Projects interstate gallery swap. Exhibiting two iterative exhibitions across two cities with artists from UNSW Art & Design and Canberra. The Fig Tree at AD Space features work by Grace Blake, Jacqueline Bradley, Kieran Browne, John Carolan, Sean Minhui Tashi Chua, Felix Idle, Joanne Leong, Dierdre Pearce, Rebecca Selleck, Jess Selmer, Amardeep Shergill. Curated by Lucy Chetcuti.
OPENING: Tuesday 3 September 2019, 6.00pm - 8.00pm
EXHIBITION: 4 - 14 September 2019
WHERE: AD SPACE - UNSW ART & DESIGN
ADDRESS: EG01, CNR OXFORD ST & GREENS RD, PADDINGTON NSW 2021
HOURS: WED TO FRI 11AM-6PM, SAT 11AM-4PM
AD Space is a student run exhibition space at UNSW Art & Design. Managed by Arc @ UNSW limited in partnership with UNSW Art & Design faculty.
This project is supported by the ANU PARSA Student Extracurricular Enrichment Fund and UNSW Art & Design Student Council.
Image: Kieran Browne, The Other Side 2018, Seance; prayer beads, wood, candles. Performance video still.
