ON AIR-Carte Blanche to Tomás Saraceno

Arthub is so thrilled to announce that Tomás Saraceno’s new solo exhibition ON AIR will be opened in Palais de Tokyo on October 17th. Arthub has participated this show as the exhibition partner and contributed a new commissioned sound installation Algor(h)i(y)thm with artist Tomás Saraceno. This exhibition will last until January 6, 2019.

About the Exhibition

The exhibition ON AIR is an ecosystem in becoming, hosting a polyphonic choreography between human and non-human universes, where works reveal common, fragile and ephemeral rhythms and trajectories uniting these worlds. As a hybrid organism, ON AIR is made of a myriad of presences, animate and inanimate, that meet and cohabit within it. Some voices become quiet, whilst others, usually less heard in the world, are magnified. The exhibition functions as an ensemble, performing the illegible ties between events and sensibilities, the togetherness of earthly and cosmic phenomena, weaving a web of relations that cannot be described but maybe can be felt.

ON AIR proposes a space and time that reveals the strength of the presences floating in the air and the way they interact with us: from CO2 to cosmic dust, from radio infrastructures to reimagined corridors of mobility. Thus, the invisible histories that compose the nature we are part of invite us to rethink poetically new ways to inhabit the world – and of being human.

While extractivist activities that mine the Earth for resources continue to threaten entire ecologies, ON AIR celebrates new ways of thinking about our relation with the planet, through new modes of knowledge production. This is to open itself up to the debate and global challenges posed by the Anthropocene, a word proposed to define the current epoch we live in on Planet Earth, in which some human activities leave an impact so important that they profoundly modify terrestrial ecosystems. It is thus especially through the activities of Aerocene, an interdisciplinary artistic project initiated by Tomás Saraceno that seeks to reactivate a common imaginary to collaborate ethically with the atmosphere and the environment, that the visitors are invited to collectively engage in an urgent exercise of planetary attunement.

ON AIR echoes the artist’s practice as it gathers numerous collaborators and collaborations, bringing together scientific institutions, research groups, activists, local communities, visitors, musicians, philosophers, non-human animals, and celestial phenomena, all of whom equally take part in the evolution of the exhibition. Workshops, concerts, public symposiums regularly transform an exhibition that constantly remake the Palais de Tokyo into a vast “cosmic jam session”.

The “ON AIR live with…” Events

The ON AIR exhibition, featuring daily a chorus of human and non-human voices, hosts events that enrich and transform it throughout its duration, especially during the three days of the “ON AIR live with…” program. During each occurrence on October 26th, November 23rd and December 14th, a symposium brings together researchers, activists and artists within the exhibition spaces.

Curator: Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel

With: Tegenaria domestica, Evan Ziporyn, Enoplognatha ovata, Leila W. Kinney, Robert Barry, Markus J. Buehler, Anna-Sophie Springer, Radio Galena, Argiope lobata, CO, Nephila edulis, CO2, Sasha Engelmann, Argiope bruennichi, David Haskell, Caroline A. Jones, Étienne Turpin, Julia Eckhardt, Larinioides sclopetarius, Dust mites, Badumna longinqua, Christine Rollard, Carol Robinson, Bertrand Gauguet, Ozone, Luca Cerriza, Anselm Franke, Fecenia sp, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Estelle Zhong Mengual, Theridiidae sp, PM25, Steatoda triangulosa, Eben Kirksey, Megan Prelinger, Stavros Katsanevas, Vinciane Despret, VOC, PM, Brandon LaBelle, Gravitational waves, Nephila inaurata, Linyphia triangularis, Timothy Choy, Dereck McCormack, Christina Dunbar-Hester, Jussi Parikka, Isabelle Su, Neriene clathrata, Linyphiidae sp, Zygiella x-notata, Philipp Ursprung, Milovan Farronato, Michael Marder, Holocnemus pluchei, Eratigena atrica, Éliane Radigue, Mitchell Akiyama, Black Holes, Black Carbon, Marie Thébaud-Sorger, Moon, Neriene peltata, Aerocene Explorer, Agelena labyrinthica, Porous Chondrite, Nick Shapiro, Nephila senegalensis, Whales, Peggy S. M. Hill, Alvin Lucier, Philopanella alata, Christine Southworth, Yannick Guedon, Filipa Ramos, Roland Mühlethaler, Frédérique Ait-Touati, Cyrtophora citricola, Jens Hauser, Bruno Latour, Cyclosa conica, Albert-László Barabási, Parasteatoda tepidariorum, Latrodectus geometricus, PM10, Psechrus jaegeri, Débora Switsun, Gabriele Uhl, Museo Aerosolar, Mark Wigley, Alex Jordan, Benjamin Bratton, Steatoda grossa, Anelosimus studiosus, CHO, Meteorites, Primavera de Filippi, João Ribas, Jonathan M. Ledgard.

About Tomás Saraceno

Tomás Saraceno was born in 1973 in Tucumán, Argentina. After obtaining his Masters in architecture at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de la Nación Ernesto de la Cárcova in Buenos Aires, Tomás Saraceno studied Fine Art at the Städelschule in Francfort, followed by a Masters in Art and Architecture at the IUAV in Venice. Saraceno then moved to Berlin, where he works on projects that aim to travel “on and beyond planet Earth”. In 2009, the artist’s work was exhibited at the 53rd Venice Biennale, “Fare Mundi” directed by Daniel Birnbaum. His last major solo shows include “Cloud Cities”, presented at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin in 2011, and “On Space Time Foam” at the HangarBicocca in Milan in 2012. The same year, Saraceno produced an in situ Cloud City installation at the Metropolitan Museum of New York’s rooftop. Since 2013, Düsseldorf’s K21 Ständenhaus presents his aerial installation In Orbit, and in 2016 the show “Stillness in Motion, Cloud Cities” has been on at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

He has held residencies at Centre National d’Études Spatiales (2014–2015), MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (2012–ongoing) and Atelier Calder (2010), among others. His work has been widely exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions, and is included in the collections of MoMA, New York; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin; among others.

Tomás Saraceno first presented his work at Palais de Tokyo in February 2015 in the exhibition “Le Bord des Mondes”, then proposed the seminar Aerocene along with the workshop “Museo Aerosolar”, in response to the COP21 in December 2015. His work Du sol au soleil was on view from October 2017 to January 2018 in Palais de Tokyo’s offsite exhi» bition Voyage d’Hiver in the gardens of Versailles’s castle.

For more details about this exhibition, please click Palais de Tokyo link here.