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Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet
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Marcos Ramírez ERRE: Shangri-La: el sueño volatil (Shangri-La: The Volatile Dream), 2008
Can art inspire conservation? Can conservation inspire art? Six years ago, eight artists began a journey to try and answer this question. BAM/PFA, in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) and the international conservation organization Rare, commissioned them to travel to eight UNESCO-designated World Heritage sites and to create new works of art in response to their travels and experiences there.
Mark Dion traveled to Indonesia, to Komodo National Park; Marcos Ramírez ERRE went to the Three Parallel Rivers area of Yunnan, China. Diana Thater chose to work at iSimangaliso Wetland Park in South Africa, and Xu Bing, at Mount Kenya National Park. Dario Robleto traveled to Waterton Glacier International Peace Park on the U.S./Canadian border; Ann Hamilton, to the Galápagos Islands; Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, to El Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve in Mexico; and Rigo 23, to the Atlantic Forest South-East Reserves in Brazil.
The end result is this intriguing but philosophically open-ended exhibit at the University art Museum in Berkeley. Rather than giving definitive responses, Human/Nature opens the door to a community of ideas about the social and cultural dimensions of our natural world. The concept is intellectually interesting but Berkeley's concrete bunker of an art museum is not the best space to display this. Furthermore, I would have loved to have seen a more assertive statement of the problems with "eco" tourism. "We" are loving these sites to death.
The project’s website (http://artistsrespond.org/) is made possible through the efforts of the Studio for Social Sculpture and the Annenberg Foundation. The website is worth visiting, with videos of the artists' process.
University of California, Berkeley
http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/human_nature
April 1, 2009 - September 27, 2009
E-mail Nancy Ewart @ namastenancy@hotmail.com
All images from the BAMPFA project website/press release
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