In Susanne M. Winterling’s solo exhibition, on view from 7 September 2022, an invisible force will take the role of the protagonist. In recent years, Winterling has explored the cultural, biological, and medicinal aspects of temperature. In their recent work, heat features as energy indiscernible to the human eye, which nonetheless makes bodies quiver—from desire as much as fear—and which causes landscapes to surrender to drought or transform to ashes.
This elementary force is not only destructive but can also assist in healing. One of the starting points for Winterling’s exploration of heat is ground-breaking developments in biomedical research: the equipment of bacteria with nanoparticles enabling them to carry medicine. The transfer of medicine via bacteria can be stimulated through temperature, allowing treatment to be purposefully delivered inside our bodies.
The exhibition A threshold-game of proximity, cluster and heat builds on the artist's research into the position that heat can hold in the relationship between humans and microorganisms. It connects to Earth landscapes while exploring the intimacy between bodies across species—in this case, humans and bacteria. The exhibition invites viewers to consider our various interdependencies as channeled through heat.
A collaborative listening with the humpback, the currents and the biomass
In this panel talk, art and science are brought in as equal conversation partners, exploring how we can navigate in sea- and landscapes in order to know it better and in order to tell it; allowing different species - among them human - to speak and recall the forgotten art of deep listening. You are not able to hear if you have no access to the embodied or situated position, for example you are not able to hear a water insect or crab if you don’t know how to position your ear half in and half out of the water. With joint knowledge and respect for invisible positions, we want to create a "larger" soundscape. After having been in a place of dissolving vastness of the Arctic and actually having been there as the humans we few are, being in and being with the elements. By this, we highlight a cohabitation and co living - and the visible and invisible parts of its ecology and political ecology, we will try to mitigate and introduce what listening to means. We would like to guide you through ‘listening’ with our examples of cracks, currents and parts of the biomass.
This collaborative talk is based upon meeting, listening, observing and discussions within the research field of Andenes, Norway.
IAS Seminar - 07 March 2022, 1.00 - 2.30pm.
IAS Seminar Room, Cosin's Hall, Institute of Advanced Study
Earth, Current,Gravitation and Opera in Speaking Truth to Power (featuring planetary sensing)
… presents her current works and trajectories: heat, nano carriers and biomass will cluster for questioning infrastructures and dancing modes of particles in artistic research and embankments beyond the binary with a focus on the arctic soundscape parameters.
IAS public lecture - 08 February 2022, 6.00 - 7.00pm,
Lindisfarne Centre, St Aidan's College, Durham University
Speakers include: Susanne M. Winterling, Laleta Davis-Mattis, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Roshini Kempadoo and Guillermina De Ferrari
consent not to be a single being: Worlding Through the Caribbean takes the Caribbean and Caribbean thought as a starting point, to reconsider global histories of art and contemporary public cultures. Drawing on the foundational work of Caribbean thinkers Édouard Glissant, Stuart Hall and Sylvia Wynter, the symposium explores their impact on our understanding of the material, epistemological and ontological repercussions of these Caribbean histories.
Worlding Public Cultures research project hosted a major international online conference in partnership with Tate and a programme organised by UAL’s TrAIN Research Centre (Transnational Art Identity Nation). It will explore the legacies of Caribbean thought on global art histories, public culture and activism, complementing Tate Britain’s exhibition: Life Between Islands: British - Caribbean Art 1950s – now.
excerpt
"Autumn 2020. The semester in Norway started in August as there is a different seasonal experience going on. An invitation to Rupert’s alternative education programme reaches me and I am somewhat delighted as systems of education are struggling with the pandemic, societies and governments too, but individuals and their networks are somehow expected to cope and balance. Balance is a Buddhist endeavour — if we can say so accepting the limits of language — but when bound to bodies of entanglement, we know a priori that it is a challenge. It is challenging to perceive and sense different levels of violence, the intrusion of Gaia and all pores of exchanged knowledge, materials and data in their infrastructural settings. At its extreme, it has shown how far apart many institutions of education actually are when it comes to what it means to be human in times of crisis. …"
About the publication 'Things that we were thinking with'
"For five months in the strange year of 2020, thirteen selected artists, curators, thinkers, researchers and hackers have thought together, with things, trying sometimes to get it as well. But as we learned, getting it is not a straightforward process or an ultimate goal, it is rather a wavering state of becoming or an intimate process of untangling or maybe, a chill moment of immersion. In this issue of Rupert’s Journal, you will find the works that in different ways touch upon these processes and modalities of things that we were thinking with. In addition to the works by Aistė Ambrazevičiūtė, Dalia Maini, Artūras Čertovas, Céline Mathieu, Jo Kalinowska & Georgie Sinclair (plot twist), Jurgis Bernatonis, Sholto Dobie, Anna Karanevskaya and Valentin Duduk (CONTAMINATED NAILS), Guoda Šulskytė, NKO, Vilius Vaitiekūnas, texts by Susanne M. Winterling, Eglė Ambrasaitė and Viktorija Rybakova and an interview by Patricia Reed were commissioned to help navigate this strange terrain of things and thinking."
State of the Art is a Nordic-Baltic transdisciplinary network of artists, practitioners, researchers, and organizations who have come together to discuss the role, responsibility, and potential of art and culture in the Anthropocene.
By developing creative practices, transdisciplinary collaborations, and public engagement, the network aims to create resilience and concrete actions for living the change in culture, economy, and environment, and to find concrete hands-on methods to deal with the Anthropocene and environmental crisis.
The network wants to strengthen competencies in remote hosting and participation as well as practical sustainability, which will be applied in the production of the activities and throughout the network.
During its three years, State of the Art Network will be dealing with the following questions:
How can...
...transdisciplinary practices help to deal with the causes and effects of the Anthropocene?
...we collaborate across borders, disciplines, and artistic methodologies?
...our activities assist in living the change for a continuous liveable present and future?
...we address factors that reinforce the Anthropocene like racism, species-ism, inequality, and xenophobia?
...we create awareness about the complexity of the situation and facilitate encounters to learn to process complexity instead of falling for simple answers and solutions.
...we implement structures of care and support which enable us to continue our work?
...we be examples in practice and encourage a paradigm shift along Sustainable Development Goals?
The network's goals and potential outcomes include:
- facilitating the creation of transdisciplinary partnerships in the Nordic-Baltic region
- Sharing experiences, knowledge, and good practices to learn from a wide range of practitioners and localities
- Challenging ourselves with the complexities at hand
- Developing and testing together creative practices and concrete actions for living the change
- Diversifying and strengthening the relations between the participating organisations, as well as those between the organisations and the public at large
- Making concrete proposals to funders on how to support sustainable practices for artists and cultural organisations
- creating an online and print-on-demand publication
State of the Art Network is supported by Nordic Culture Point, Nordic Culture Fund, and A. P. Møller Foundation.
hosted by BIOART SOCIETY HELSINKI
We are a global network of thinkers, researchers, policy-makers, opinion-formers and community activists whose diversity forges new conversations and relationships. We produce, exchange and learn from world-leading scholarship and insights drawn from community-embedded experience and praxis at the interface between human rights and the environment all over the world.
The Dead Are Restless, They Speak! is the third episode of the Mini-Lab co-organised by Anawana Haloba (University of Bergen) and Romeo Gongora (Goldsmiths, University of London).
The Dead Are Restless, They Speak!, will bring together leading scholars, their public and practitioners to critically engage, through a workshop and a public conversation, with the writings of Frantz Fanon and Paulo Freire. Frantz Fanon once wrote that "literature increasingly involves itself in its only real task, which is to get society to reflect and mediate" and Paulo Freire envisioned social action as "a clear invitation to all who wish to participate in the reconstruction of society". In today's world where the politics of Brexit and Trump have become sounding gong our ears that our diseased with, how do Frantz Fanon and Paulo Freire's work evolve in their real task to mediate and to transform?
Planetary sensing: navigations below the surface is an artistic research project on bioluminescence.
This ancient natural phenomenon, the old magic and weapon against the colonial oppressor in some indigenous cultures, is now an alarm system for the future of an ecosystem in peril.
The project is prototype building and aims to counter balance environmental violence with conservation and artistic means for
non-humans and humans.
Tuned in with the quantic and the cosmic, wherein earth is the same as the sun its companions, we study at the particle level. Heeding an ethical call from/to the undercommons, as we move, seeking a radical anticolonial, critical racial, feminist path that trails along but sits beyond the one delimited by the many ’isms’ (postcolonial, etc) that have named the critical task and its version of justice
As a way to navigate through the turbulences and transformations these times, under condition that imposes complicity with patterns of violence repeating, this study group takes a root string in soil of a antifascist practice (alliance with a feminist local artist from history and ecology specific)
Photographs des buttes (Angle 14°)
24 pages, 14,8 x 20 cm
Booklet, saddle stitched
Published by Multiples
"Winterling has photographed a small group of people based in Paris. At the center of this group is an older intellectual named Alain, and with his small apartment as a main base they carry out an underground fellowship involving free thought with a philosophical approach to political and economic questions. The group documents its activity via camera and pen on various closed internet platforms."
In this project, the speculative desert is simultaneously real and imaginary, containing traces of life-forms past and yet to come, of civilizations of humans and kingdoms of non-humans, the site of continual mythmaking as an inscription of the past (cultural past to planetary pasts) and myths of times to come (humans on a desert planet, to the absolute planetary future of a desert planet Earth). This continuum, made visible in contemporary posthumanist thought, multispecies ethnography, and feminist science studies, will be pushed out from the confines of philosophy so that speculations of history, science, and art, can be synchronized and made visible through the artefacts of the imagination. Working through the history of desert speculations, we argue for a need to develop new speculations of the desert that may overlay the discourses of the anthropocene, through new taxonomies and new cartographies.
The Pandora project is a collective artifact which started with a group of artists, poets and cultural producers, as they suddenly began to talk to each other from different angles, unusual positions, far from the couch. – poet Isidore Ducasse once wrote “do not succumb / under-lie / move away from that couch.” – he was right.
These talks expanded each time these artists met, as they were bringing in their new friends, their greatest antagonists, their demonic persecutors. They became a long long series of dialogues, which were later collected on the soft fibers of a papyrus roll. Suddenly it became clear to them that, while talking, they were also transforming their mutual discourses, as well as the necessity that laid behind them. With the flow of the roll they were actually creating an artifact – a Pandora Box – a mischievous gesture that for as tiny and unassuming it was, could as well be capable of emanating extraordinary sounds and powers, redeploy the order of things, set free the anguish of their private, earthy mythologies.
Ausgehend von zwei exemplarischen, transdisziplinären Projekten behandelt der Vortrag die Verstrickung von Desertifikation und Küstenerosion, die Gemeinschaften bedrohen. Die Untrennbarkeit von Interspezies-Materie und nicht-menschlicher Materie birgt das Potential für ökologische Solidarität, für „unruhige“, gemeinschaftliche Transformationen auf planetarischer und molekularer Ebene. Die Anerkennung von Differenzen bei gleichzeitiger Verbundenheit sowohl in technologischer Hinsicht als auch innerhalb der Tragödie der Commons wirkt dabei als Trigger. Geschichte und Strategien der Dekolonialisierung können innerhalb der künstlerischen Forschung und Imagination herangezogen werden, um die Technologien der Schildkröte und der Epiphyten zu betrachten oder die Verdammten dieser Erde sichtbar zu machen. Wissenschaft wird für Menschen ermächtigt, sie wird zu einer Technologie der Gerechtigkeit von unten: die Algen und die Sandformationen schließen sich zusammen, lassen, von Strömungen geleitet, andere Kartographien und Infrastrukturen in Sandspuren entstehen.
"In this episode of the “Who Wants to Live Forever? Podcast Series”, Elizabeth A. Povinelli and Susanne M. Winterling discuss whose lives matter and who they matter for, and how the divide between biological and geological matter is connected to capitalist extraction and hierarchisation in the Anthropocene.
Elizabeth A. Povinelli is an anthropologist and filmmaker. She is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, New York; Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy for the Humanities; and one of the founding members of the Karrabing Film Collective. Recent publications include Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (2016) and an upcoming graphic essay, The Inheritance (Duke 2020). Povinelli lives and works in New York and Darwin.
Susanne M. Winterling works across different media to explore the economy of the perceptible, digital cultures and the social life of the materials of our built environment. She is known for her time-based installations that examine the representation of reality. Her artistic practice mirrors the political and aesthetic implications and power structures between man/non-human/materials. Recent exhibitions include Myths of the Marble ved Henie Onstad Kunstsenter and ICA Philidelphia, An Inventory of Shimmers at MIT List, Contour Biennale 2017, The Sea around us at The Model Ireland and The Henry Art Museum. Winterling is a professor at Trondheim Academy of Fine Art."
"Winterling scratches way below the surface to unveil a magical world of oceanic bio-luminescence. This Model talk discusses her unique artistic practice and her poetic engagement with natural phenomenon in the work planetary opera in three parts, divided by the currents.
Winterling also discusses her work in the context of ecosystems in peril and our relationship with the natural environment."
"Sara R. Yazdani: In 2011, Rom for Kunst organised an exhibition of Tom Sandberg’s large-format photographs, hung over the entrance of Oslo Central Station. Black- and-white images denote an entire era of modern analogue photography, both its poetic and its documentary aesthetics. I remember one image from this public project in particular: the child bending and placing her head on the ground. It is present yet remote at the same time.
Susanne M. Winterling: What struck me was the classical physicality of these images and also the way that they are very ephemeral. But another reason to use Sandberg’s work as a starting point for our conversation is how in that setting, in the middle of life, they take on a near animated quality. The train station is such a time place and seemed such a strong materialisation of the moments captured in Sandberg’s images. This time in this space matters in a station, so one can get very close to the singularity of those moments. When we look at the images, we zoom in and pause them against this background of the busy station. We’re aware of the medium, the large photograph, because it’s immersed in this context, yet stands out in its singularity.
…"
"In her conference talk, Susanne M. Winterling will show some of her recent works including Planetary Opera In Three Acts, Divided By The Currents (2018), a composition of sounds, natural and synthetic, documentary and imaginary. The composition includes hydrophone recordings of dinoflagellates, the sound of green turtles hatching, crabs rubbing their claws together and other ecological marvels. Enacted is a sensory inversion of the dominant anthropocentric dynamics that governs our sensual and political consciousness. What if we try to reverse the scale and focus, and deploy historical forms of media, usually associated with the internal human drama, to express the drama of the planet instead? Sensors of change and actors in climate change, the tiny protozoa in this imaginary aim to generate a new sense of interspecies alliance; a connection to blur the nature-culture division, the entangled social and ecological conflicts and actual structures reproducing violence. Let’s join the creatures that dwell within planetary space and through the currents."
"Using film clips and objects from the Karrabing Film Collective and research on bioluminescence, Elizabeth A. Povinelli and Susanne M. Winterling jointly explore the governance of existence in the crumbling discourses and practices of geontopower. What forms of existence are staying put, retreating, being extinguished, and gaining affective force; and what political vocabularies are emerging as the fictive politics of logos gives way to other signals, senses, and dreams? Where will our anti-capitalist antagonists emerge from? What shape will they take—red algae, toxic sovereignties, precariat posthumans—and where will this leave those clinging to the benefits of late liberalism?"
A podcast on contemporary art presented by New Local Space in Kingston, Jamaica
"In einer Site Visit im Kunstverein Freiburg initiierte die Künstlerin Susanne Winterling ein Gespräch mit dem Informatiker Wolfram Burgard über die Entwicklung autonomer Roboter, über gesellschaftliche Folgen und ethische Möglichkeiten solcher intelligenter, technischer Systeme.
Das Zusammenspiel von menschlicher Subjektivität, Technowissenschaften und Ökosystemen bildet schon länger einen Brennpunkt von Winterlings Arbeit, insbesondere Fragen der Andersartigkeit und die Koexistenz von Lebensformen im Athropozän. Technische Vorrichtungen wie Touchscreens oder Interfaces verbindet Winterling mit biologischen Phänomenen wie die der Biolumineszenz bestimmter Planktonarten und stellt damit vermeintliche Gegensätze zwischen Natur und Technik oder Körperlichkeit und Virtualität in Frage."
Short excerpt on the occasion of a seminar on art and activism Feb 26th 2016 to accompany the exhibition "Deception in High Places: Woman Cleaning Weapon Industry" by Gitte Sætre at Oslo Kunstforening. Copyright: Susanne M Winterling
Opting for a poetical rather than a power oriented practice Susanne M Winterling is looking at the ecology of the work in the exhibition and the necessity to question ”who sings the nation state” in a tiny heresy as well as a grand gesture.
"There is a world of things. There are things that cause us headaches. Things we have a hard time understanding. Things that challenge our beliefs, that resist definitions. Things we love, but risk suffocating with our eagerness to name them. There are things, ideas that, rather than wanting to be jotted down, ask first to be touched, ingested. But, hey, how can anyone touch or ingest an idea? It is a matter of intimacy: moving closer, into the vicinity of the thing we wish to know about. How could anyone write or speak about love, for instance, without having experienced its uplifting tunes and dreadful turns? How could one write about advanced capitalism and its regimes of surveillance and control if not by pushing at its normative permissions and restrictions?
…"
"The fragmented epistolary exchange reproduced in this edition forms the core of a publication to come addressing the relations of Swiss critic, activist and traveller Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908-1942) and the American novelist Carson McCullers' (1917-1967). Reading with these letters we ask: how do we align ourselves and how do we form investments of solidarity? What is an "aesthetic solidarity"? The worldly position of an affective work is not only layered but highly complex, perhaps to an unbearable extent.
…"
"A scorpion’s entire exoskeleton may act as one giant light receptor, a full-body proto-eye that detects shadows cast by moonlight and starlight. Light, skin, titan and bodyconsciousness to navigate between shelter and space: an artist book by susanne m winterling drifts around a core where each page is a collage of objects layered around in life size, then spreads out into the bookspace and installation works using photography and film non representational but rather as a space itself. Texts and interviews with Chris Kraus, Anja Casser and Susanne Østby Sæther throw light on the material, tactile as well as the media-conceptual and poetical work and influence structure. The visceral idea is the entanglement beyond any nature/culture divide (and roughly based on A document made by Paul Thek and Edwin Klein)."
shelter, the lighthouse of fragility
Angle 13-14°
24 pages, 14,8x20 cm
Edition of 360, numbered
"The history of the former railway works in Lingen, Germany, whose buildings now house facilities for the art, media and business communities, inspired artists Ruth May and Susanne M. Winterling to create a number of works, which they designed specially for display in the Kunsthalle Lingen and which are documented in this publication.
Ruth May’s fabric and paper collages, ink drawings and costumes, which evolve from the folds of reality, together with Susanne M. Winterling’s films, objects and photographs, can be seen as metaphors for movements that bind the railway works space with its different stories, and vice versa."
"Coming After is a response to the recent renewal of interest in the period from the mid-1980s to early 1990s that was decisive for North American cultural politics. This time period witnessed the Culture Wars, the birth of “queer” as an identity and theory, and the rise of a direct-action AIDS activist movement — epitomized by ACT UP — fighting a new plague that was devastating communities of artists, queers and people of colour. While these years were highly traumatic, they also represented a galvanizing, dynamic moment for queer citizenship — one that is arguably haunting our present and our future. This exhibition does not focus on those artists who were, as artist Christian Holstad succinctly put it, “burying their dead” at that time, but instead those who grew up in the shadow of the crisis, whether by fate or by choice. Their work evidences a sense of having come after or missed out on something. The potential represented by both very recent and more faraway radical (queer) historical moments is both an open wound and a fount of inspiration. What was lost along the way from then to now?"
".... Und ich bin überzeugt, keiner der hier Anwesenden wird das in Frage stellen. (Die Kamera hat sich während der letzten Sätze langsam hinter Johns Schulter bewegt, sie betrachtet die Welt jetzt aus seiner Perspektive und beobachtet, wie der entstellte, todgeweihte einem Abgeordneten näherkommt, der leicht angeekelt zurückweicht.) My Lords, wir sollten Gerechtigkeit fordern... (anerkennendes Gemurmel) ... Wenn der Zeitpunkt kommt, an dem unser guter König von uns gehen muss, dann hochverehrte Lords, lasst seinen katholischen Bruder auf ganz normalem Wege folgen. Sollte er aber nicht würdig sein als König, dann ist es nur recht und billig, ihm den Kopf abzuhacken. (großes Raunen) Aber nur, wenn das gesamte Haus dies so entscheidet. ... (Anerkennung wird stärker) ... Ich wünsche, dass diese unwürdige und zerstörerische Gesetzesvorlage für immer verworfen wird. (Große Zustimmung, fast einem Aufruhr nahe. John macht sich langsam und unter großen Schmerzen davon. Das Bild verweilt auf dem König, er steht nach einer Weile auf und geht. Er holt John auf der Treppe ein.)"
"The exhibition and book project 'Art Economies Beyond Pattern Recognition' intends to reconsider art's complex and intricate relationships to the market. This publication does not contain documentation of the exhibition held at Osage Shanghai, but is a separate yet interrelated project. Different individuals in the field, including artists, gallery owners, museum directors, curators, collectors and critics, have been asked to provide new formulas, ideas, and to propose new models for an economy of art through written descriptions, drawings, instructions, or any other form that could be included in the book."