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ARKEN Bulletin, special issue
ARKEN - Museum of Modern Art Deadline: Jan 8, 2020
Anne Kølbæk Iversen, Aarhus University
From a Grain of Dust to the Cosmos. Rethinking positions of the human through art Call for abstracts for a special issue of ARKEN Bulletin.
Inspired by recent discussions around the position of ‘human’, ‘nature’ and ‘posthuman’ vis a vis a horizon of climate crisis and technological developments, ARKEN Museum of Modern Art dedi- cates the upcoming issue of its peer-reviewed journal ARKEN Bulletin to articles engaging with aesthetic and theoretical interrogations of human-nature-technology-entanglements. We hereby call for proposals for articles to be published in September 2020.
We invite contributors to expand upon issues connected to questioning positions of the human starting from an interest in discussions of other-than-human modes of existence, production and agency, as well as speculations around alternative and future forms of life, art, sex and mytholo- gies. These are issues addressed in several artworks in ARKEN’s collection, by among others: Nan- na Debois Buhl, Astrid Myntekær, Lea Porsager and Patricia Piccinini. Contributors to ARKEN Bul- letin may expand on the practices of these artists but may also look into the practices of other artists who deal with these issues.
We invite contributors to reflect on contemporary art along two connected perspectives:
1. Inquiries across disciplines into relationships between natural, human and technical forces.
What are the implications of a rethinking of these relations for understanding how we as humans are impacted and impact upon our natural and technical environments?
2. An extended understanding of ‘cosmos’ and ‘cosmology’. On the one hand, cosmology refers to questions of the universe and the scales that such a cosmic awareness opens to. On the other hand, notions of cosmos and cosmologies refer to more local organizations of human existence in view of the technical and mythological horizons for this existence. How does art address cos- mic, inter-planetary relations and scales? And in which ways do the artworks contribute to posi- tioning human individuals and collectives viewed as cosmological inquiries?
Central to both perspectives are the questions of scale of time and space and how the critical con- siderations of the Anthropocene condition (and the related -cenes), as well as the category of the posthuman, inspire to zoom in and out between macro- and microscales, placing the human as a molecular arrangement, then a geological agent then a narrativizing subject.
We presuppose that art holds a central position for addressing these perspectives through its aes- thetic and media-specific sensibility towards processes of different kinds as well as through its
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world-making gestures, and we invite contributors to reflect on this.
We invite abstracts for articles that engage with contemporary art in relation to:
- The Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Cthulucene etc. – ecocriticism – planetary consciousness - Posthumanism – entanglements – autonomous technologies – enhancements of the human body (transhumanism)
- Cosmos: the universe, its organization, natural laws and cosmic time - Speculative cosmologies / cosmology in anthropology
- Art, aesthetics, media materialities / technologies / operationalities - Media geology, cosmotechnics
- Timescales: time of technical processes, biological time, geological time, historical time, mytho- logical time
This volume of the ARKEN Bulletin is part of the research project 'From a Grain of Dust to Cos- mos' taking place at ARKEN in 2020 funded by the Danish Cultural Ministry’s committee for research.
Please send your abstract (maximum 300 words) together with a short biography before 8 Jan- uary 2020 to either of the editors, Anne Kølbæk Iversen and Gry Hedin: anne.iversen@arken.dk or gry.hedin@arken.dk
Deadline for abstracts: 8 January 2020.
Deadline for articles (5000 words): 15 April 2020.
Estimated publication date: 20 September 2020.
For further information on the ARKEN Bulletin and research projects see: https://uk.arken.dk/bul- letin/ and https://uk.arken.dk/research-projects/
For information on the artworks in the collection contact anne.iversen@arken.dk ARKEN Museum of Modern Art
ARKEN is one of Denmark’s largest museums of contemporary and modern art. In 2018 around 410,000 guests visited the museum. Our focus is on high-quality research-based exhibitions of international modernism and contemporary art.
Recent exhibitions include presentations of modern artists such as Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Niki de Saint Phalle, Simon Fujiwara, Patricia Piccinini and Ugo Rondinone.
ARKEN’s collection focuses on international contemporary art from 1990 on. Among many others the collection features works by Elmgreen & Dragset, Candice Breitz, SUPERFLEX, Mona Hatoum, Damien Hirst, John Bock, Ai Weiwei, Anselm Reyle and Olafur Eliasson.
Reference:
CFP: ARKEN Bulletin, special issue. In: ArtHist.net, Nov 26, 2019 (accessed Feb 27, 2022),
<https://arthist.net/archive/22173>.
