Sea levels are rising. This is a threatening consequence of the climate crisis, not only for coastal inhabitants. This awareness provides a dark backdrop for a series of performances by the British artist Simon Faithfull. Around 2016, for example, the video “Going Nowhere 1.5” (https://www.simonfaithfull.org/works/going-nowhere1-5/) was created in the North Sea, showing him filmed by a drone on a sandbank, swept over by the sea on both sides.
He walks the margins between dry sand and the waterline. One sees the sea gnawing at the sandbank, the area diminishing until the figure disappears into the sea. This is of course due to tides, but still a warning of threat scenarios in the present.
Simon Faithfull, who lives in Berlin, is now appearing at Kindl Berlin in two exhibitions, once as an artist and once as a curator. In “Earth-ling,” curated by Kathrin Becker, there are photographs, sculptures, a film and a postcard series with stories by him. In the photographs one follows the path of an ant across his arm, until the path becomes a tattooed line on his skin.
In the film one sees a luxury resort on Florida’s coast, a row of domed buildings from the 1980s, today turned into ruins in the sea. Cormorants and other birds now live here. No mood of catastrophe pervades these images in “Reenactment for a Future Scenario no.2: Cape Romano,” but rather a peaceful observation of the new inhabitants. The sculptures are busts of Faithfull’s own head, made habitable for mushrooms and bees.
Relationship of Humans to Animals and Plants
The works of the twelve artists that Faithfull has selected as curator for “An Intimacy with Strangers” also address the relationship between humans and animals and plants, shifts in perspective that correct the narrative of humans as the crown of creation, and other forms of coexistence. His own exhibition thus becomes, in a sense, a prologue, a sympathetic gesture of humility.
The search for a redesign of the relationship between humans and other life manifests in many forms. A few weeks ago, it was the film “Silent Friend” by Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi, which told of communication with plants in three episodes, once also as a love story between a young man and a geranium. In “An Intimacy with Strangers,” it is the Chinese artist Zheng Bo who makes visible an erotically charged relationship between naked young men and the ferns and roots in a jungle.
Because they appear so small and lost, the white objects Peggy Atherton has tucked into the corners of the rooms touch one another. It soon becomes evident that the forms in the series “Roadkill” are based on animal cadavers—birds, mice, squirrels, and rabbits—found on roads. What covers them so white as a shroud is porcelain, inside which the animal skeletons have been burned to ash.
Transforming the mortal remains in this way is a symbolic act to honor the animals’ former lives. To elevate the everyday as something special also happens with Pope L., who, with a small potted plant, a dandelion, crawled along New York’s streets, documented in photographs.
Joseph Beuys, who gave art to a dead hare, may have served as a godfather here. Jessica Segall, in turn, recalls his action of having himself enclosed for several days in the René Block Gallery in New York with a coyote in 1974. Her two-channel video work “(un)common intimacy” shows her underwater, with a tiger and an alligator.
She wears red high heels and a red dress, presses her head and shoulders against the alligator’s belly, or extends her hands with red-painted nails toward the tiger’s paws. One is astonished by this adventure, the circus-like courage, the unfamiliar closeness. What else happened during the performance is not known.
In his book “Survival of the Nettest,” the scientist Dirk Brockmann emphasizes the necessity of cooperation, which he describes as a successful model of survival, derived from analyses of various natural-historical scenarios. The exhibitions by Simon Faithfull and his artist colleagues offer images in this context that trigger intellect, feeling, and imagination, in order to deviate from familiar patterns of classification. Even if perhaps not everything they propose works.
