Anne Duk Hee Jordan: Making Kin 3.0

KIOSK presents Making Kin 3.0: a fluid, eco-utopian installation and the first solo exhibition by Anne Duk Hee Jordan (b. 1978) to take place in Belgium. In her performances, installations, motorized sculptures and edible landscapes, Jordan explores the crossroads of art, science and mythology. In a humoristic manner, she opens doors to an artistic universe inspired by sealife, biology, sexuality and procreation, nurturing and ecology. This way she creates romantic machines that copy or transform biological processes and chemical reactions between living organisms and inanimate material. The title of the exhibition references the book by biologist and philosopher Donna Haraway from 2016 called Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.

Discover a video report of the exhibition here.

Are competence and the law of the strongest the real engines of evolution? We are taught to see the earth through a neoliberal interpretation of Darwin’s theory, evolving on the basis of natural selection. Yet several scientists have shown themselves to be free-thinking and inventive enough to go against this pervasive idea. They see symbiosis and the connectedness of beings as the driving forces of evolution and of Gaia, earth and the goddess of nature.

Lynn Margulis and Donna J. Haraway are two distinguished scientists, philosophers, and activists who have conducted and published groundbreaking studies on the importance, respectively, of symbiosis and “making kin.” The realization of their theories on how we could relate to each other would have gigantic consequences for our economy and our political organization.

What would happen if we stopped seeing each other as individuals or competitors, and started seeing each other as allies? What if we functioned as organisms that can only survive when they are in union with each other? What would happen if we saw Gaia, the earth, as one big breathing lung that keeps everything alive? Would the pollution of the earth, the extinction of animal and plant species, and the climate crisis assume the same proportions? Would colonization, the domination of individuals over living organisms—other people, animals, plants— take on such destroying proportions?

Korean-German artist Anne Duk Hee Jordan breathes symbiosis. Her work, Atmospheres of Breathing, installed in the anatomical theatre of KIOSK, addresses exactly this: who has the right to breath in our world and how can we imagine a more symbiotic way of breathing and being? “The only certainty is that we live and breathe in continuous change, as we are subjected to a state of constant flux,” says Duk Hee.

Read the full interview Let’s Rewild KIOSK! with Anne Duk Hee Jordan conducted by Els Roelandt (editor at KIOSK).

Anne Duk Hee Jordan dives deep into the roots of our souls and encourages us to look at reality differently, to use our imaginations and senses to see living organisms as part of ourselves. Make kin, she says: connect with the beings around you and breathe with them.

KIOSK is open every day, Monday to Sunday, 12-6pm, with free access.