Susanne M Winterling

This conversation is about how some ten years ago, ideas of time and agency were being explored anew in the field of contemporary art. Simultaneously, artists and thinkers were reflecting on different concepts of nature and life to shed light on the actual conditions on Earth. Art was becoming a site that incited new dimensions of thoughts, and over the years, artistic efforts emerged to critically investigate new relations between art, global politics, and ecologies at a time of environmental crisis. Yet questions of the relations between art and different ecologies on Earth are of course not new; they have been a topic of the avant-garde since the beginning of the twentieth century. What was new in the late 1990s and early 2000s, however, was how artists began to emphasize such questions in light of digital networking technologies, which, through some particular critical approaches to non-human agency explored how and to what extend natural systems of the world may resonate with digital ones.

One of these artists is Susanne M. Winterling. She experiments with different modes of thinking about agency and the living by engaging with the natural world through an oceanic worldview. Foregrounding bioluminescent dinoflagellate algae (indicators of the health of coastal waters), epiphytes (organisms that grow on plants and get nutrition from air and water), and other plants and species, her works point to some odd types of life on Earth. In her installations—often involving sculptures, images, sound, and screen projections—processes taking place in nature and biological life (seeing, sensing, touching) merge with processes taking place within digital environments: They forge alliances, collectives, where life and nature cannot be reduced to some modern fantasy of an opposition between nature and culture. Here planetary sensitivities and network systems come together as a collective whole that puts the future into new perspectives.

Sara R. Yazdani is PhD Candidate in Media Aestethics at the University of Oslo and works as an art critic. Susanne M. Winterling is an artist and professor at Oslo National Academy of the Arts. This conversation can be found in our current issue.

This publication picks up on several of the themes which emerge conceptually and artistically in the Central Asian Pavilion project, and elaborates them in a philosophical, historical and poetic register within the specific materiality and temporality of a book – though the website as a repository and forum for these kinds of explorations should be mentioned as well – with its capacity to extend the time, space and context of the ideas beyond the Venice Biennale and to a readership beyond the project's immediate public. The Pavilion's organizing metaphor of 'Winter' is appropriated from the poem by 19th century Kazakh poet, intellectual and activist Abay Qunanbaiuli. The metaphor of winter here evokes social stagnation, cultural censorship and political unfreedom. It refers to a context where the intensity of debate on social goals lags and there seems to be little or no horizon for change; a situation then, which varies more in degree than in kind from the one we experience in the relatively privileged environs of the North and West of the world of capital, where economy not only comes first, but political means are used to enforce economic goals, imposing and deepening crises of reproduction for billions of people. This is not to lose the specificity of the Central Asian situation, nor the differences between the nation states which fall into that rubric – Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. 

However, Winter also embodies a potentially transformational character, as winter precedes spring and the snow gives place to a full blossoming; a frozen public dialogue may be replaced by a more participatory one. We believe that art is still able to serve as a catalyst for creating a genuine public debate, to end the state of hibernation and, in short, to open doors for the arrival of spring. A spring that has not yet come to Central Asia.

Featuring essays on the geopolitics of energy, post-Soviet political narratives, art-historical analyses and the political economy of contemporary art in a time of social crisis, the book gives a snapshot of the aesthetic, political and poetic dimensions of the situation in the region. Contributors include Viktor Misiano, Kari Johanne Brandtzaeg, Adil Nurmakov, Kerstin Stakemeier, Ruslan Getmanchuk , Ekaterina Degot, Maria Chekhonadskih, and artists projects from Anton Vidokle, Slavs and Tatars, Vyacheslav Akhunov, and Faruh Kuziev.

Tjago Bom, Vanessa Ohlraun, Ayatgali Tuleubek, Marina Vishmidt, Susanne M. Winterling, eds.
Texts by Viktor Misiano, Kari Johanne Brandtzaeg, Adil Nurmakov, Kerstin Stakemeier, Ruslan Getmanchuk , Ekaterina Degot, and Maria Chekhonadskih.
Artists projects by Anton Vidokle, Slavs and Tatars, Vyacheslav Akhunov and Faruh Kuziev.