Nature Red in Tooth and Claw addresses the intersections between nature, violence and the body through the concept of immunity, which is not considered only in the biological sense but as a system reflected in ecology, politics and society.
The process of making this project is the starting point for a reflection on the relationship between ecology, human health and contagion, highlighting our underlying beliefs of competition and survival when it comes to our relationship to the natural world.
Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, - a phrase by British poet Alfred Tennyson that was at least as much known as the more familiar ‘survival of the fittest’, starts at the imaginary animal market, the birth of the Covid pandemics. Dismantling a militarized thinking about health and nature, the project presents several artistic interventions where autoimmunity, parasite and queer ways of being show contradictions in the human centric views on immunity.
Inspired by the Italian philosopher Robert Esposito’s discussion on the relationships between immunity and community, it seeks to think how reciprocity and rebalancing - and even a contagion may offer an important contribution to the collective co-habitation at the time of the sixth extinction, which scientific modernity has often failed to acknowledge.
The exhibition includes several new works, a commission by Armenian Canadian artist and designer Serina Tarkhanian, a result of their long term collaboration with microbiological experts conceived as a community healing tool, a new sculpture series by Šimon Chovan reversing modernist notion of hygiene and digital collages by Lucie Rosenfeldova inspired by feminist posthumanist thinking. Together with works by Alicja Rogalska, P.Staff and Marina Hendrychova it reconfigures the community, poetics and desire where a conventional protection is contested by the current urgency to accept risks and alienation as a way out of ecological ruin.
The important part of the exhibition were also Insurgent Skinships, inaugural lecture by Serina Tarkhanian Սերինա Թարխանյան; lecture by Sophie Lewis; What goes around comes around? Colonial violence and transnational repro-assistance moderated by Hana Janečková; Quarantine and Segregation, a discussion with Andrej Belák and Stano Daniel, moderated by Zuzana Jakalová.
