Sediment Spirit: The Activation of Art in the Anthropocene
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This exhibition took place from 15 October 2023 to 14 April 2024
Sediment Spirit was part of our season: Planet for our Future: How do we adapt to a Transforming World?
Curated by John Kenneth Paranada, the first Curator of Art and Climate Change at a UK museum, this exhibition brought together local and international artworks from the 1960s to the present day that respond to the climate crisis in all its complexities.
These provocative and interactive artworks invite audiences to view the Earth as a living and responsive being that we play an active part in sustaining. Sediment Spirit acts to remind audiences that our home is not just the house, the building, town or country we reside in, but the Earth itself. The artworks in Sediment Spirit connect us back to the corporeal, poetic, social and visceral experience of human-made climate change. They expand our capacity to re-imagine our surroundings and how we might exist within them in more sustainable ways to provoke new ways of living, offering ways forward by providing hope and imagination.
Sediment Spirit was curated by John Kenneth Paranada, in dialogue with the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, and Explorers Against Extinction.
Sediment Spirit presented works by:
Salvatore Arancio, Paul Cocksedge, Richard Deacon, Henry Driver, Ackroyd & Harvey, Karrabing Film Collective, Roelof Louw, Claudia Martínez Garay, Mario Merz, Paulo Nazareth, Tabita Rezaire, Anj Smith, Shireen Seno, Superflex, Derek Tumala and Emily Young.
Image: ‘We Are Having The Time of Our Lives’, 2019, SUPERFLEX. Courtesy of von Bartha. Photo credit: Pinelopi Gerasimou. Courtesy of Onassis Stegi.
Claudia Martínez Garay: Artist Residency
September – October 2023
Claudia Martínez Garay (born 1983, Peru) came to the Sainsbury Centre for an artist residency responding to the question ‘How do we adapt to a Transforming World?’ in dialogue with the Sainsbury Centre collection.
Martínez Garay made an incredible new work that reanimates the fragments of lost histories, underscoring the diverse connections of Peruvian Indigenous cultures with the natural world. The work is presented alongside Sediment Spirit, extending the exhibition across our arts landscape into the Living Area, marking the first time this internationally respected artist is showing her work in a major UK art institution.
Claudia Martínez Garay lives and works between Amsterdam and Lima. She has exhibited internationally, including at the Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, China; Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany; Museo del Barrio, New York; and the Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE.
Images of Claudia’s work in Sediment Spirit can be seen below.
From the exhibition
