NYAB Event - Rachel Sussman “The Oldest Living Things in the World”

Rachel Sussman “The Oldest Living Things in the World”

Pioneer Works

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Brooklyn-based contemporary artist and 2014 Guggenheim Fellow Rachel Sussman brings her largest solo exhibition to date of The Oldest Living Things in the World to Pioneer Works: Center for Art and Innovation in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Curated by Christina Costello, formerly of The Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition will feature 35 photographs – including 47”x57” editions of five made from medium format film – accompanying writings, and a site-specific installation of her research materials and ephemera.

Since 2004, Sussman has been researching and traveling the globe in search of its oldest inhabitants — continuously living things 2,000 years of age or more. Working with leading scientists, she captured everything from multi-millennial trees to 5,500-year-old moss to half-million-year-old bacteria, traveling from Antarctica to Greenland to the Mojave Desert to the Australian Outback, artfully cataloguing these ancient survivors through her photographs and writing. In a nod to scientific field notes, Sussman hand-titles each work, comprised of: the organism name, date photographed, catalog number, age, and location.

Sussman’s practice is contextualized by the multidisciplinary inquiries and new photographic conceptualism of Taryn Simon and Trevor Paglen. In the forward of her book, Hans Ulrich Obrist writes “What sets [Sussman] apart from other conceptual artists is that her research project is closely related to the research of a scientist…[The Oldest Living Things] is a category that is defined by curiosity, humane character, a fascination with deep time, and the courage of an explorer.”