ALLORA & CALZADILLA

For Allora & Calzadilla’s solo debut in China, the Puerto Rico-based artists will explore the notion of Ganying or ‘sympathetic resonance’—a concept originating in ancient Chinese cosmology that is also used in contemporary language to signal the entanglement of forces and beings in everyday life events. Drawing upon wind and ocean currents through human and more-than-human history, the artists will present Aeolian Charts (2023), a new series of works on paper which consider the poetic potential inherent in climate modeling and the visualisation of global, atmospheric phenomena. Accompanying this new body of work is Penumbra (2020), a projected digital animation that recreates in the gallery the effect of light passing through foliage in the Absalom Valley of Martinique. The work is projected at an angle based on a real-time simulation of the sun’s location over the exhibition space and is complemented by ‘shadow tones,’ a psycho-acoustic phenomenon perceived when two real tones create the semblance of a third. The exhibition highlights Allora & Calzadilla’s inventive practice where the intersections of philosophy, history and ecology find formal expression and are held in a graceful and paradoxical balance. A companion publication, featuring a newly commissioned study by the Barcelona-based research group einaidea, will further elaborate on Ganying as an eco-political model for speculative, decolonial, and transnational cosmologies.