ponds among ponds: an exhibition of threshold behavior and nested life

Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA)
at New York University Shanghai
25 March – 29 May 2021

Viruses teach us that we humans are really little more than a multi-species ecosystem among multi-species ecosystems—ponds among ponds.
— Tobias Rees, 2020

In a recent essay addressing the intersectional frictions of the novel coronavirus pandemic, the climate crisis, and recent microbiome research, the philosopher Tobias Rees remarked, “We humans are really little more than a multi-species ecosystem among multi-species ecosystems—ponds among ponds.” Borrowing this as an umbrella term for rethinking the relationship between organisms and their various endo- and exo-somatic ecologies, ponds among ponds: an exhibition of threshold behavior & nested life proposes an alternative approach to the presentation of natural history. Instead of beginning from the assumption that the organism is the basic unit of evolution, what if we consider the multi-scalar, nested ecologies of life as symbiotic sequences that challenge ideas of competition and survival of the fittest? The fundamental proposition of ponds among ponds is that the current concept of organismic life is insufficient for thinking with and adapting to contemporary climate and biodiversity crises.

Thinking with the pathbreaking work of evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis (1938–2011), ponds among ponds presents objects, images, texts, performances, and movements through artistic points of view, troubling current forms and proposing other organizations of life. The concept of “threshold behavior” contends that all organisms are ecologies unto themselves that operate as assemblages ordered and kept alive by various environmental gradients. While “nested life” challenges the predominant image of climate change as an eventuality wherein an organism (typically, a human organism), as a unit of coherent and sovereign volition, struggles against the outside forces of nature. Such an impoverished sense of threshold behavior leads to a repetition without difference. Instead, in order to begin to conceive of, and thereby adapt to, the massive challenges of climate change (and the no less imperiling situation of biodiversity destruction), it is necessary to imagine the human, and the organism, as ecologies within ecologies, or ponds among ponds.

Central to the exhibition, in its performance-installation, Brussels-based Agency calls forth gatherings and discussion around controversial intellectual property cases, raising questions such as: are living things patentable subject matter? A video by Maximilian Prüfer explores the consequences of environmental destruction upon the pollination process within agriculture, while Berlin-based artist Anne Duk Hee Jordan, in her collaboration with Pauline Doutreluingne, has developed a multimedia wedding bed-installation, opening a nonlinear perspective on species migration and the botany of desire. Shanghai and Yueyang-based artist Mao Chenyu’s further invokes the figure of the agricultural worker and space-time of Chinese rural society in two films, one of which will premiere at the close of the exhibition. Extending the exhibition out into the city, walking maps designed by Zaanheh Project’s Monika Lin invite visitors to key areas around Shanghai to think with the emergent ecologies of the local watershed. Finally, Reassembling the Natural the exhibition, conceptually and materially, with traces of Lynn Margulis and her collaborators: A curatorial station entitled “Reassembling Symbiosis” includes a documentary film directed by John Feldman exploring her life and ideas (accessible online throughout the duration of the exhibition); the gallery is also lined with curtains (entitled “Reassembling the Outside”), designed by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin in collaboration with Wolfgang Hückel and produced by the ICA team, which prompt visitors to imagine the gallery as a symbiont with the city of Shanghai, imagining the curtain as a permeable membrane between inside and outside, art and nature.

For ponds among ponds, exhibition curators Springer and Turpin (Reassembling the Natural) have worked with the ICA at NYU Shanghai to engage with local collections, museums, and related sites of scientific research, as well as artists and cultural producers. By bringing these respective objects of research together in one exhibition space, their project continues to work across disciplines and develop new modes of spatial juxtaposition and curatorial montage that enable scientific and aesthetic practices of inquiry to inform one another.

ponds among ponds: an exhibition of threshold behavior & nested life and its related events are presented as the final season of The (Invisible) Garden, the ICA’s 2019–21 artistic research program that inquires into the garden as a method that shapes our understanding of Nature and our relationships to other species. From Fall 2019 through Spring 2021, the ICA at NYU Shanghai presents artists, thinkers, and practitioners, through exhibitions and events, to consider the garden and ask how might we denature Nature?

The exhibition was curated by Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin (Reassembling the Natural), and was organized by ICA director & curator Michelle Yeonho Hyun with Zhu Sicong, who were assisted by Chen Yijiao, Wang Yuxin, Chen Yindi, and Qin Xiaoyan.

Documents & Resources

ica.shanghai.nyu.edu/ponds-among-ponds/exhibition&events
Exhibition poster and curatorial essay (PDF in English & Chinese)
Exhibition floorplan and artwork contextualizations (PDF in English & Chinese)
Press release (PDF in English & Chinese)
“From the Anthropocene to the Microbiocene,” essay by Tobias Rees in Noema, 2020
Read an article about the exhibition & its concerns on the NYU website