“At the turn of the millenium, Earth’s spin started going off-kilter, and nobody could quite say why.” Raymond Zhong, “Something Was Messing with the Earth’s Axis. The Answer Has to do with us” in The New York Times, June 28, 2023.
It was with some surprise that geophysicists have measured a change in our planet’s rotational axis, data which started to be made public in the past year. The explanation: large amounts of water pumped out of the earth for household and agricultural use have shifted how the earth’s mass is distributed. And yet, even though everything is now slightly off-kilter, on the surface things remain the same.
In 1960, less than two decades after the nuclear disaster of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, writer Marguerite Duras was commissioned by filmmaker Alain Resnais to write a script about this tragedy. Duras’ task, puts forth a quandary : how does one attempt to convey that which is incommensurable, which is inadmissible, which is unfathomable? Through the dialogue of the characters, set in Hiroshima, one of the main protagonists admits that the sequence of events was beyond what could be conveyed by a flat denial of any possible memory or description of the aftermath of the event. Within the banality of a romantic affair, a decade after the bomb, everyday life unfolds on the Peace Square in Hiroshima, and yet nothing will ever be the same.
The artists in The Earth has Shifted, have been invited to think about an Earth off-kilter, off-axis, where experiences or ruptures have left a trace or shift in our environment, difficult to convey or describe, yet present in our psyches.
Exhibiting artists: Marlon de Azambuja, Fadia Haddad, Mohammad Ghazali, Hussein Nassereddine, Neda Razavipour, Hessam Samavatian, Azzedine Saleck, Baktash Sarang and Nil Yalter
Sarina Basta is a curator, teacher and director of the Bureau des heures invisibles, an arts research organisation based in Aubervilliers that connects artists with civil society. She was the artistic manager and curator at Confort Moderne, Poitiers, and co-curator of the Move Festival at the Centre Pompidou in 2018. Winner of the Gulbenkian Curator Chair at the Beaux-arts de Paris, Basta has organised two major exhibitions at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, while also mentoring students and graduates. In the early 2000s, Basta was curator at the SculptureCenter and associate curator of the Performa Biennial in New York. A graduate of the SPEAP program founded by Bruno Latour at SciencesPo, Paris, and of the Whitney program ISP, New York, she is in charge of the Supercanon post-graduate program at EESI, an art school in Angoulême and Poitiers, and sits on the scientific committee of the RADIAN doctoral program co-organised by ESAM, Cherbourg and Caen. She is the editor of numerous art catalogs, and author of Vito Acconci’s chronologie raisonnée.
