MARKET ART FAIR 2024: Entangled Life
V1 Gallery is pleased to present:
Entangled Life
Rose Eken (b. 1976, DK), Mischa Pavlovski Andresen (b. 1990, DK), Klara Lilja (b. 1989, DK), Anton Funch (b. 1992, DK), Kaspar Oppen Samuelsen (b. 1977, DK), Sara-Vide Ericson (b. 1983, SE), Loji Höskuldsson (b. 1987, IS), Thomas Øvlisen (b. 1974, DK), Emma Kohlmann (b. 1989, US), Troels Carlsen (b. 1973, DK).
MARKET ART FAIR
17–19 MAY 2024
Entangled Life is a curated group exhibition inspired by Merlin Sheldrake’s quietly radical book: Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. Through eight chapters Sheldrake raises fundamental questions regarding our “species superiority”, our ideas of evolution, definition of biology, but also our conceptions concerning the boundaries of selfhood. The book challenges the dominant anthropocentric understanding of the universe, proposing new possibilities for a critical ecology of the future.
All the artists will present new works on the occasion of the presentation at Market 2024. This group of artists form a beautiful, dynamically interconnected network themselves, spanning a variety of media, age ranges, nationalities and gender.
“A mycelial network is a map of a fungus’s recent history and is a helpful reminder that all life-forms are in fact processes not things. The “you” of five years ago was made from different stuff than the “you” of today. Nature is an event that never stops. As William Bateson, who coined the word genetics, observed, “We commonly think of animals and plants as matter, but they are really systems through which matter is continually passing.”
― Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures
“Classical scientific definitions of intelligence use humans as a yardstick by which all other species are measured. According to these anthropocentric definitions, humans are always at the top of the intelligence rankings, followed by animals that look like us (chimpanzees, bonobos, etc.), followed again by other “higher” animals, and onward and downward in a league table—a great chain of intelligence drawn up by the ancient Greeks, which persist one way or another to this day. Because these organisms don’t look like us or outwardly behave like us—or have brains—they have traditionally been allocated a position somewhere at the bottom of the scale. Too often, they are thought of as the inert backdrop to animal life. Yet many are capable of sophisticated behaviors that prompt us to think in new ways about what it means for organisms to “solve problems,” “communicate,” “make decisions,” “learn,” and “remember.” As we do so, some of the vexed hierarchies that underpin modern thought start to soften. As they soften, our ruinous attitudes toward the more-than-human world may start to change.”
― Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures
“Anthropomorphism is usually thought of as an illusion that arises like a blister in soft human minds: untrained, undisciplined, unhardened. There are good reasons for this: when we humanise the world, we may prevent ourselves from understanding the lives of other organisms on their own terms. But are there things this stance might lead us to pass over – or forget to notice?”
― Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures
