Sentient Objects

Challenging narrowly anthropocentric narratives, NEW DAWN | Tool to touch in Times Ahead, sees physical and virtual materials not as inert human possessions but instead as actants, with particular frequencies, energies, potential and aura to affect real and virtual worlds. Any object has the potential to acquire a sentient faculty that allows not only their use but also a sphere of interaction and autonomy. Echoing envisions of a future in which aesthetics is a conjunction between organic and synthetic realms, the exhibition offers a visual narrative that triggers critical awareness of how objects, nonhumans, and other forms of animate and inanimate matter are raced, gendered, classed and sexualized by productively redirecting conversations about biopolitics away from human-centric topics. Matter—both in real or virtual realms—does not function as a passive channel for human action, affects, and desire; instead, it acts, constructs, reshapes, choreographs, and obstructs the audience with whom it interacts. The materiality and presence of a garment or an artwork carries a charge or pulse that radiates energy into those (things) in proximity. The current brought forth by matter transforms—visibly, tangibly, or imperceptibly—the sociocultural, economic, ecological, and performative and exhibit conditions in which it takes part.

In order to resist and overcome binaries such as human/nonhuman, real/virtual, sociality/materiality and utopia/dystopia, NEW DAWN | Tool to touch in Times Ahead focuses on the ontology of things: what they are, how they happen, where they go, and who and what they impact in relational ways. In foregrounding the agency of nonhuman entities we are challenging the way exhibitions and performances approach the literal and material structures that support the spaces to be taken and the spectators to be enacted.

Felipe Duque

Speculative Philosophy

The philosophy, as practiced by Dr. Swantje Martach in and around NEW DAWN , wallows in the richness of deeply and truly Zeitgeist-corresponding speculative narrations that this project realizes. It considers NEW DAWN as an artistic strengthening for, and wishes to boost NEW DAWN by growing its connection to the theoretical database of the speculative philosophical sector, that until recently was happening merely in the canonical margins, but the voice of which is becoming louder in these ecological, viral, cosmological, aquarian times. For so doing, it immerses itself in, and allows itself to be overrun by such issues as a shift from glove-thing to gloving, its residence between fashion and fetishism, its queering of the touching/touched binary, and its realist reconsideration of the aesthetic. Read the article

Dr. Swantje Martach