Emergent/cy - Ausstellungseröffnung

am 10. April
18:00-22:00 Uhr
Burggasse 24/4
Eintritt kostenlos

“Emergent/cy” is a group exhibition curated by Marilyn Volkman (Entre, Burggasse 24) and Maggessi/Morusiewicz (8BR1, Weiglgasse 8/B/R1). It features artistic works centering on plants and plant life in relation to the currently popular issues in environmental ethics and vegetal ecologies, broadly pertaining to the reframing of the term “climate change” into “climate emergency” and “climate crisis.” This change illustrates the outcomes of the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit discussions, which proposed the revision in the mainstream ways of thinking of the catastrophic changes resulting from people’s unlimited extraction of Earth’s natural resources. This pessimistic realization––that human civilization will likely end due to its own action––informs the Anthropocene studies, which recognize the overall human failure to provide environmental sustainability due to the over-reliance on fossil fuels whose burning brings about catastrophically high levels of greenhouse gas emissions. A significant area of interest related to the Anthropocene studies is plants and plant life, which underlie several relatively new and emerging fields of research, such as environmental humanities, critical plant studies, human geography, and political ecology, to name just a few. These fields propose useful analytical frameworks of understanding the multi-layered relationship between humans and plants, also in the contexts of individual nation-state policies for plant cultivation, framed as a vital element of national heritage missions. One outcome of this interest in the diverse agency of plants is a critical reframing of the conventionally Western way of thinking of plants as a non-sentient, passive, and therefore “lower” forms of being. In this way, plants are thought of not merely as ornaments or as metaphors that describe aspects of human life, but, increasingly, as entities that people themselves can learn from, as organisms whose agency far exceeds what is conventionally imagined as their subservient function in human life. We recognize this shift as a red thread that runs across the exhibition’s artworks and artistic practices, which demonstrate the artists’ diverse forms of relationality with plants, while reflecting on their agency in specifically situated (time, place) contexts.

hello@maggessi-morusiewicz,
entrevienna@gmail.com,
https://www.entrevienna.com/

@kuntsverein, @entre_vienna

Design: Guilherme Maggessi, Originalbild: Przemek Branas 2025