Nicolas Bourriaud invites artists from all around the world to question the contemporaneity of the romantic concept of the sublime, at the age of the
anthropocene.
The awareness of climate change modified our collective relation to the earth in many ways, but it also impacted the human gaze. Within this context, the romantic notion of the sublime has been given a new turn: based on the relation between humans and nature, defined as a feeling of "delight associated with terror" and by the contrast between immensity and the individual, the sublime is the aesthetic notion that corresponds to the anthropocene.
In
Planet B. Climate Change and the New Sublime, French writer and curator Nicolas Bourriaud invites artists from all around the world to question the contemporaneity of this concept through 3 chapters unfolding in 3 acts of the exhibition: 1. Intercessions (Every exhibition is a forest). 2.
Charles Darwin and the coral reefs. 3. The tragic death of Nauru Island.
Works by
Nils Alix-Tabeling,
Dana-Fiona Armour,
Charles Avery,
Gianfranco Baruchello,
Hicham Berrada,
Bianca Bondi,
Peter Buggenhout,
Roberto Cabot,
Alex Cerveny,
Anna Conway,
Sterling Crispin,
Kendell Geers,
Anna Bella Geiger,
Loris Gréaud,
Max Hooper Schneider,
Agata Ingarden,
Per Kirkeby,
Agnieszka Kurant,
Romana Londi,
Turiya Magadlela,
Lucia Pizzani,
Thiago Rocha Pitta,
Ylva Snöfrid,
Nicolás Uriburu,
Ambera Wellmann,
Haegue Yang,
Phillip Zach.
Published on the occasion of an eponymous exhibition taking place at Palazzo Bollani, Venice, from April 20th to November 27th, 2022.
Planet B. Climate Change and the New Sublime is the last chapter of exhibitions initiated with
The Great Acceleration. Art in the Anthropocene (Taipei Biennial, 2014), followed by
Crash Test. The Molecular Turn (La Panacée, 2018) and
The 7th continent (Istanbul Biennial, 2019).
Nicolas Bourriaud (born 1965) is a French curator, theoritian and writer. He was the founder and director of Montpellier Contemporain (MoCo), gathering the
La Panacée art centre, the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and Hôtel des Collections. He was the director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris from 2011 to 2015. He was Gulbenkian Curator for Contemporary Art at Tate Britain in London from 2007 to 2010 and founder advisor for the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in Kyiv. He also founded and co-directed the
Palais de Tokyo, Paris, between 1999 and 2006, and founded the curatorial cooperative
Radicants in 2022. He is the author of the landmark publication
Relational Aesthetics, published in 1998, and still inspirational today for many artists, curators, and art professionals worldwide.
Bourriaud's curated exhibitions include
The 7th continent, Istanbul Biennial (2019),
Crash Test. The Molecular Turn, La Panacée (2018);
Back to Mulholland Drive, La Panacée (2017);
Wirikuta, MECA Aguascalientes, Mexico (2016);
The Great Acceleration, Art in the Anthropocene, Taipei Biennial (2014);
The Angel of History, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Paris (2013);
Monodrome, Athens Biennial (2011) and
Altermodern, Tate Triennial, London (2009), among others. Nicolas Bourriaud was also in the curatorial team of the first and second Moscow Biennials in 2005 and 2007.
