Arts of the Earth

Curated by Manuel Cirauqui

Arts of the Earth addresses the transformations undergone by art practices in recent decades, under the light of an increasingly evident and overwhelming environmental crisis. Tracing out a diverse cartography across disciplines and languages, Arts of the Earth offers an inventory of tools, prototypes, tests, and hypotheses. Rather than being prescriptive or dictate what should be done, thought, or felt, the exhibition holds a documentary stance towards the signs of a crucial shift in aesthetic production, in terms of both the resources used and the awareness of their interdependence. Undermining the hegemonic model of the museum as a repository of static, sanitized objects that reject the natural change of matter, Arts of the Earth presents a large array of works that rewrite their material relations with posterity. 

In recent years, artists from radically different contexts have pondered how to incorporate the agencies of the earth and reclaim museum spaces for the biosphere. Arts of the Earth addresses the anticipatory or even prophetic power of such practices. Bearing witness to this force are historical works, in many cases partially or completely reconstructed, recreated or reactivated. Ephemeral and limitless, vulnerable and porous, these had to navigate decades of monumental, individualistic, anthropocentric, predominantly Western and masculine formalism. In their quiet degradation and renewal, all foreshadow the overdue reform of museum conservation protocols from the perspective of climate debt, and the societal need to acknowledge the truth of material cycles. Recent commissions and productions by contemporary artists, in close dialogue with the Basque territory, resonate with this epochal urgency. 

Occupying most of the second floor of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Arts of the Earth explores how contemporary art connects us with the ground as a material space and shared ecosystem. The exhibition has no sections or chapter order; instead, dense swarms of ecopoetic affinity form in each of the spaces as well as in their interstices. Arts of the Earth connects artifacts made with dirt, wood, leaves, roots, and plants—ancestral media that have a renewed relevance today—with site interventions that transcend historicist designations and groupings and that often coincide in their anti-monumental intent. On a logistical level, Arts of the Earth combines energy efficiency with the comprehensive use of compostable or recycled elements in its installation and museography; also eliminating air shipment of artworks and avoiding the construction of new shipping crates. The exhibition aims to be a prototyping space not just for objects of perception and tools of action, but also for the strategies and criteria that will define the museum of the future.

Artists in the exhibition: Claudia Alarcón, Vicente Ameztoy, Giovanni Anselmo, Joseph Beuys, David Bestué, Heidi Bucher, Gabriel Chaile, Mel Chin, María Cueto, Patricia Dauder, Mar de Dios, Jean Dubuffet, Hans Haacke, Agustín Ibarrola, Inland/Campo Adentro, Richard Long, Ana Lupas, Isa Melsheimer,  Ana Mendieta, Asier Mendizabal, Fina Miralles, Asunción Molinos Gordo, Delcy Morelos, Frederick Ebenezer Okai, Dennis Oppenheim, Gabriel Orozco, Giuseppe Penone, Claire Pentecost, Perejaume, Solange Pessoa, Benedetta Pompili, Asad Raza, Oscar Santillán, Jorge Satorre, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Tomás Saraceno, José María Sicilia, Michelle Stuart, Paulo Tavares, Unión Textiles Semillas, José Luis Uribe, Sumayya Vally / Counterspace, Meg Webster, and Héctor Zamora.

The show is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring essays by curator Manuel Cirauqui, architect Berta Gutiérrez, and the Unión Textiles Semillas collective; as well as key documents and statements from the artists David Bestué, Mel Chin, Mar de Dios, Fina Miralles, and Dennis Oppenheim, aimed at generously reflecting the diversity and cross-disciplinary nature of the exhibition.