Theme

At the still point of the turning world

In his poem Burnt Norton (1936), the first part of the Four Quartets (1941), poet T.S. Eliot described a special state between time and motion, beyond the physicality of our bodies. The poem is about how to escape the regular ticking clock to find a redemptive timelessness, the silent point of the spinning earth. Eliot described that state between the motions of past and present as ‘the eternal dance’, where we can live on through art and poetry far beyond our material existence. It is that special place in the heart of the storm where you see and hear it raging, but where it cannot touch you. A place where you can turn your gaze onto what is really going on, to understand and breathe in deeply before taking action. Eliot wrote these poems between two world wars, trying to find a way out of the tension of societal destruction and social hostility, a tension that is all too recognizable in our current times. Today, the suffering of the world is intensely felt in our daily lives, and chaos tugs at our sleeves. How do we remain awake and conscious enough to stand up for each other's rights in solidarity instead of rubbing the sleeping sand of powerlessness deeper into our closed eyes?

The artists in this exhibition each show through their own practice how to take a stand by making connections with each other, by sharing intergenerational stories and ancestral knowledge, and exploring the relationships between the material and emotional, the individual and the cosmic. What can be the role of our personal experiences and desires in a bigger picture? Each artist works from other cultures and listens to other world spirits to shape these relationships. Nobody exists in a vacuum. Indeed, each body leaves its mark as it goes through life. Statements by several famous astrophysicists over the years have coalesced into one well-known quote: "we are all stardust." It is an observation that Anne Duk Hee Jordan, one of the participating artists in this exhibition, also refers to in an important essay on the sexual lives of marine animals that she co-wrote with curator Pauline Doutreluigne ("Gentle Breeze: Changing Sex in Ecology," 2021). Human life emerged from the disintegration of other cosmic bodies, the dust of stars that recycled and reoriented themselves into new atomic conjunctions. It is a way of poetically underscoring our kinship with the world and other lives around us. Jordan and Doutreluigne therefore use this knowledge to push for healthy more-than-human relationships.

Physicist Karen Barad teaches us that our bodies are not ‘limited’, but continue to exist in space beyond our skin. We constantly seek connection on a molecular level with the outside world, or as gender and literary scholar Julietta Singh describes it in her book No Archive Will Restore You (2018): "Molecularly, we spread into the ‘outside’ world, mingling with it in ways that are not apparent to us.” Here Singh also cites the extraordinary statements of American philosopher Nancy Tuana, who challenges “the boundaries between our flesh and the flesh of the world,” by arguing that all bodies are porous. If these connections can exist on a natural scientific level, it seems all the more important that we also learn to perpetuate them mentally, culturally and spiritually by being open to new, non-discriminatory narratives and the poetry of others. CAConrad, one of the poets who have inspired our curation and who also stars in I Hope I'm Loud When I'm Dead, Beatrice Gibson's exhibited film, sums it up very well: “this mechanistic world… has required me to FIND MY BODY to FIND MY PLANET in order to find my poetry.”

The necessity of art and poetry in a world in decline may sound soft-headed, but it is essential. Back in 1985, pioneering author Audre Lorde wrote that poetry is not a luxury but a necessity in her essay "Poetry Is Not a Luxury." First and foremost, poetry is more than a collection of cleverly structured lines of verse; it is an essential form of expression for those who are discriminated against, and Lorde writes especially about and for Black women. Like T.S. Eliot, Lorde identifies a place of potentiality. She describes how the darkness of oppression in the hearts of Black women can create a liberating verbal energy that is neither Western nor superficial. She draws on deep and ancestral knowledge that can live on like this. “Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.” Words can thus become a political weapon to claim freedom and break free from white, Western and patriarchal cultures imposed through systematic colonization and assimilation. In essence, poetry can give a voice to people whose voices remain structurally unheard.

As it was for Eliot, the illuminating and healing stillness of poetry and art seems the only way out in a world falling apart for Lorde and other poets too. Eliot’s poetry collection Four Quartets describes the final days of a world spinning faster and faster into its own collapse. Gender and cultural scholar Jack Halberstam wrote about the aesthetic of collapse in his book Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (2020). In the book, he delves into Western cultural history to analyze how the ‘wild’ was often associated with queerness and queer bodies throughout the 20th century. In doing so, he proposes new interpretations of what 'wildness' is, but also looks concretely at how art can make space for resistance, just by being that still point in a turning world. He bases his theory on the fact that a late-capitalist economy survives through peaks and declines that always takes into account the occurrence of crashes, which makes a complete natural destruction of systems of exploitation and extraction impossible. Halberstam writes that we ourselves must participate in the ‘unbuilding’ of the world, that we ourselves must work toward collapse so that we can collectively break free from the vicious cycles of exploitation and profit, boisterous consumption and colonialism. The imagination of such a dismantled world happens first in art and culture, he writes. In doing so, he sees silence as a complementary way to be resistant. "Silence breaks through noise." An aesthetic of collapse can then involve a series of artistic gestures that deal with falling, that teach us to love chaos and clutter, or aestheticize decay. Halberstam sees this attitude as an opportunity to break the silence of the world just with stillness and powerful calmness - just as a sit-in for peace, a hunger strike or a silence protest can also offer radical resistance.

But let us certainly not forget Audre Lorde's other winged and justified words, "Your silence will not protect you." Our silence will not protect us. In a similar gist, poet Adrienne Rich wrote Tonight No Poetry Will Serve (2011), a poem and published collection that Alfredo Jaar also refers to when he wonders in healthy self-reflection whether art can play a role in bettering society. Julietta Singh wrote that no archive - no memory, no recollection - can restore a ravaged body. Singh accurately describes the outside world to which our bodies must relate: “(…) we are made up of an outside world which constitutes, nourishes, and poisons us in turns.” The world is not just a chaotic place, but continues to evolve into a repressive place for more and more people and communities. How can you sustain yourself when your life and that of your loved ones is disrespected, dulled, literally destroyed, or even taken away from you? The answers proposed in the exhibition will never be sufficient. The still point in a turning world shouldn’t be misunderstood as a numbing or paralyzing silence. It’s a stabilizing point with effervescent energy, where the fire keeps burning to fight for everyone's right to a dignified and meaningful life.

The exhibition ends with an eclipse in Anouk Declercq's film: the dazzling darkness is silent and heavy. Darkness and disconnection are weapons of war today: what one cannot see or record elsewhere, what one cannot hear or record elsewhere, did not happen. But the dark eclipse is temporary, and was even welcomed in many ancient cultures as an entry into a renewed world: a new energy. The "nur," the life-giving light of the world, heralds a reincarnation at the beginning of the exhibition in Saodat Ismailova's film. The circle is complete.

Selected readings:

T.S. Eliot - Four Quartets (1941)
CACONRAD - You Don't Have What It Takes to Be My Nemesis. And Other (Soma)tics (2023)
Audre Lorde - Poetry is not a luxury (1977)
Etel Adnan - Sea and Fog (2012)
Etel Adnan - Time (2019)
Etel Adnan - Shifting the Silence (2020)
Judith Halberstam - Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Perverse Modernities) (2020)
Julietta Singh - No archive will restore you
KAE TEMPEST. - On Connection (2020)
Michael Taussig - Mastery of non-mastery in the age of meltdown (2011)
Richard Powers - Bewilderment (2021)
Sara Ahmed - Wilful Subjects
Adrienne Rich - Tonight No Poetry Will Serve (2011)
Nancy Tuana - “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina” (in: Stacy Alaimo & Susan Hekman (eds.), Material Feminisms, 2008)
Anne Duk Hee Jordan & Pauline Doutreluingne - “Gentle Breeze: Changing Sex in Ecology” (in: Stefanie Hessler (ed.), Sex Ecologies, 2021)

Footnotes:

“Molecularly, we spread into the ‘outside’ world, mingling with it in ways that are not apparent to us.” p. 30

** “the boundaries between our flesh and the flesh of the world.” p. 30

*** “this mechanistic world… has required me to FIND MY BODY to FIND MY PLANET in order to find my poetry” A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, New (Soma)tics. p.?

**** Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

***** “(…) we are made up of an outside world which constitutes, nourishes, and poisons us in turns.” p. 30