Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.”1)
– D. J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

Antenna Space is pleased to announce that the artist Liu Chuang will participate in the exhibition Reclamation, New Rocks, Stray Dogs, Birds, and Acoustics of the Garden at Incheon Art Platform, Korea. The exhibition will open on May 21, 2021 and last until July 25, 2021.

The exhibition Reclamation, New Rocks, Stray Dogs, Birds, and Acoustics of the Garden is titled based on examinations of development and the ecological condition surrounding Incheon, stray dogs and birds that have emerged amidst human-induced changes, and issues regarding coexistence with such nonhuman animals and on words collected from the city’s current environment. Though Incheon is a large port city with dynamic industrial productivity as well as a vital modern history of the first Korean open port, it is also a city of massive reclaimed lands that encroach on mudflat ecology and a place that holds a variety of environmental issues including plastic “rocks” that are becoming a part of new marine ecology, animal rights issues surrounding the recent capture of increasing stray dogs and dog farms, and issues of urban ecology and green spaces. Indeed, such points are not only limited to this city today, and contexts entangled with the words in the title of this exhibition universally and deeply affect the lives of all humans at present as well.

The figures and narratives involving the works featured in this exhibition—new rock objects; the life and survival of nonhuman animals like dogs, poultry, and migratory birds; relentless capitalism, ranging from landfills, reclamation, and urban redevelopment to bitcoin mining; the complicated truth of hope glimpsed from the Agricultural Revolution and seed vaults; the wisdom reflected in field recordings of ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples’ dreaming; and the movements and acoustics of life forms—not only are related to the present, when nature’s counterattacks have begun, but also bear the aesthetic and ethical observations and thoughts of artists who raise questions about inseparable symbiosis with nonhuman spheres. From all of this, we can surely proceed to stories about the critical point of the environmental catastrophe universally witnessed today, but this exhibition is not oriented toward such a pessimistic and dead-end truth. Rather, it pursues to compound the heterogeneity of the painterly and the sculptural, movements and sounds, wondrous objects and flora/fauna, or all such disparate types and seeks to depart from dystopian melancholy, entering another planetary time. The works in this exhibition pursue new time that links particular seeing and hearing and realizes an ecological cosmology of polyphonic state and coexistence. In other words, what we come to encounter in this exhibition are none other than various inevitable artistic imaginations as well as serious modes that practice “staying with the trouble.”

1) D. J. Haraway, Staying with Trouble: the Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 1.