Encompassing the curatorial underpinnings of The Spell of the Sensuous, the 2024 Biennial exhibition illuminates the fluid, porous boundaries between the human and more-than-human, embracing a multiplicity of ways of sensing and engaging with the thresholds of the body.

Taking shape across two locations in the centre of Amsterdam, W139 and Looiersgracht 60, the exhibition brings together tactile sculptures, video works, and large-scale installations. Seeking to echo and give form to the ongoing environmental crisis, the featured artists examine dominant exploitative paradigms, the unexposed histories of contamination, bodily landscapes, and postnatural ecosystems. At the same time, and drawing on feminist theorist and physicist Karen Barad’s text On Touching – The Inhuman That Therefore I Am, the works propose tactics of ‘visual hapticity, sensory attunement, interspecies signalling, affectively charged multisensory dance and technological intimacies’. In this sense, they aim to bridge the gap between embodied encounters and those mediated by technology, uncovering hybrid ways of relating to the world and its ecosystems.

Following this tactile thread, the works of Harun Morrison, Natasha Tontey, Jota Mombaça, Pedro Matias, Brackish Collective, Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner, and Annika Kappner, exhibited at W139, try to feel, together with a multiplicity of bodies, a connection to an ever-expanding community of beings and things. Centring the role of intuition, the artists evoke speculative communication technologies, (micro)bodily-landscapes, and matriarchal Indigenous cosmologies. Within the exhibition, the movement of water offers a fluid, anti-colonial approach to thinking and listening, while the processes of decay are understood as a poetics of metamorphosis and transformation.

My Want of You Partakes of Me - Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner

An interrogation of the process of digestion as the fundamental condition for being in the world, My Want of You Partakes of Me is a two channel video installation examining the physiological, psychological, spiritual, literary, and scientific dimensions of being consumed. Multiple storylines trace the poetics of incorporation as a matter of metamorphosis and decay, the philosophy of matter and imperial conquest, industrialisation and annihilation, poetry and parenting, love and citation.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/35926