NYAB Event - “(Un)livable” Exhibition

“(Un)livable” Exhibition

Station Independent Projects

This event has ended.

Dwelling is, or should be a basic human right. Yet we know that for many people, in many places around the globe, it is, or is becoming difficult, if not impossible. Big cities are in thralls of gentrification, which as a process tends to push non-wealthy and even middle class further away from their centers. And in some remote places, far away from urban environments, people may struggle for livability conditioned both by nature and man-made challenges. Yet there are so many different ways in which humans try and make ostensibly unlivable places if not livable, somehow survivable.

Janet Biggs and Kari Soinio both make their artworks in environments we may think uninhabitable, even though in very different ways. Biggs travels - from a Western perspective - to extreme sites: to the mines of freezing Svalbarden and volcanic Indonesia. Soinio contemplates the rapidly changing cityscape of New York: its streets, its highly contested air space, and routes underground used by millions but noticed by few. Both artists are concerned about the effects humans have on nature, and aware of the contingent value given to the intersections of gender, class, ethnicity and color. Both see strange beauty in harsh environments, but are careful not to over-aestheticize what they see.
For both of them, it is important to show that human bodies have been, and continue to inhabit and pass through these spaces and places.

Media

• Video installation

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