Each Place Its Own Mind

Opening Reception | Thursday 16 January, 6-8 pm

Mirtha Dermisache | Noémie Goudal| Sky Hopinka | Anna Hulačová | Bronwyn Katz | Kat Lyons | Yukultji Napangati | Emmanuel Van der Auwera

Each place its own mind, its own psyche.

Oak, madrone, Douglas fir, red-tailed hawk, serpentine in the sandstone, a certain scale to the topography, drenching rains in the winter, fog off-shore in the summer, salmon surging in the streams—all these together make up a particular state of mind, a place-specific intelligence shared by all the humans that dwell therein, but also by the coyotes yapping in those valleys, by the bobcats and the ferns and the spiders, by all beings who live and make their way in that zone. Each place its own psyche. Each sky its own blue.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 1996

Edel Assanti is pleased to present Each Place Its Own Mind, an exhibition that participates in an ongoing collective reimagining of our relationship with the living world, rooted in revelations from indigenous knowledge, ecological research, literature, science, and artistic experimentation. Bringing together eight interdisciplinary artists, the exhibition comprises historical works alongside new commissions, spanning drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, installation and film.

The idea of human exceptionalism that distinguishes culture from nature is the intellectual foundation of the Enlightenment and present-day western civilisation. It is by this point well understood that the cost of severing our profound bond to the living world – a process that may have progressively unfolded over hundreds if not thousands of years – was that the more-than-human world, togetherwith its social representations, lost its meaning. In theorists Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s words: 'Enlightenment’s program was thedisenchantment of the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow phantasy with knowledge…The disenchantment of the world means the extirpation of animism.'

Each Place Its Own Mind borrows its title from ecologist David Abram’s 1996 book The Spell of the Sensuous, which traces the ways the human mind came to renounce its “sensory bearings” in the natural world, visualising a myriad of “lost” faculties that link the 'inner, psychological world and the perceptual terrain that surrounds us.'

Across four adjacent rooms, the exhibition offers windows onto distinct experiential perspectives, cultivating the notion that the “objective reality” of a particular place might not be quantifiable by scientific or philosophical reasoning; instead, we may think of it as the sum of an interconnected web of experiences of people, animals, plants, micro-organisms, rocks, rivers, organic and geological systems that coexist in that space. 

Abram suggests that civilisation began 'isolating itself from the breathing earth' with the advent of phonetic formal writing systems. Taking inspiration from this theory, the exhibition’s point of departure is a sequence of late Argentinian artist Mirtha Dermisache’s 1970s asemic writing works: undecodable sequences of semi-pictorial lines, untethered to representation. Emblematic of the exhibition’s overall rhythm, each of Dermisache’s expressive works represent attempts to grasp an imagined, indeterminate new language, in recognition, in her own words, that 'it’s not important what happens on a sheet of paper, the important thing is what happens within us.' 

The exhibition continues with Anna Hulačová’s concrete busts, harbouring honeycomb interiors constructed by bees within each sculpture during swarming season. Embodying the ancient interconnection between our two species, they evoke a hybrid organism, whilst symbolising the permeable nature of body and consciousness. Explorations of mind continue in Kat Lyons’ two paintings which channel the visceral emotional charge of the animal and botanical psyche. 

Resembling organic landscape formations, Bronwyn Katz’s sculptural installation, last exhibited at the 2021 New Museum Triennial, is inspired by South African / Namibian matjieshuis home structures, made to move and adapt to varied regional weather conditions, permeable and eventually returning to the elements. Close by, the optical formations of Aboriginal Australian artist Yukultji Napangati’s paintings mirror natural phenomena, linking Pintupi ancestral narratives and Dreamings to the landforms of her Country. 

Noémie Goudal’s White Pulse (2023) photographic installation uses tromp l’oeil illusions to visualise a theoretical layer of space that could exist within a “real” geographical site – a sense of place that cannot necessarily be seen or felt, but may be thought to exist in theoretical or ethereal forms. Finally, the intimate relationship between people, spiritual practice and place nurtured by the Indigenous community of Sky Hopinka’s film Fainting Spells (2018) starkly contrasts with the technological gaze of Emmanuel Van der Auwera's acclaimed work White Cloud (2023), which navigates an artificial intelligence’s hallucinant imaginings of a mysterious rare earth mining geography.

The exhibition’s programme will include an in-conversation event between Kat Lyons and Bronwyn Katz, with dates to be announced in the New Year.