Congratulations to Hayden Fowler who will be exhibiting at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art as part of a group exhibition titled The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030–2100.
Hayden Fowler’s practice is motivated by the global human-nature crisis, widely acknowledged to be approaching a point of no return. He is particularly interested in the effect of the loss of nature on the human psyche, culture, and qualitative experience, and has been working to relate the destruction of the environment to the degradation of culture and denaturing of humanity. Fowler’s research explores historical influences leading to this moment, and varied projections of future outcomes.
Together Again (2017) is a performance-installation work incorporating sculptural, performative and digital elements, first shown at Performance Contemporary as part of Sydney Contemporary 2017, Carriageworks, Sydney.
In Together Again, the relationship between Fowler and an Australian dingo is explored in a context of disrupted realities and dislocation from landscape. The dingo and the artist co-habited a large cage during 4-hour performances. VR glasses immersed Fowler in an idyllic Australian Landscape while the dingo, fitted with a VIVE tracker, had his movements mirrored by a dingo avatar inside the VR experience – allowing the animal and the human to ‘co-exist’ within this digital re-imagining of the ‘wild’. This work is to be repeated at Garage Museum in Moscow, where the artist has re-designed the landscape as a Russian ecology and will be performed with a European wolf. Audiences are able to view the VR experience via a monitor that relays my framed live view.
In the artist’s own words, “The project has developed out of my ongoing concern with the accelerating process of extinction and the relationship between environmental loss and the depletion of human culture and qualitative experience. In particular, the project explores desires for reunion with nature, in the face of the looming impossibilities of this in a near-future world. Research in the development of the project explores indigenous world views, animism, biophilia and the ‘indigenous mind’ (a trait argued to be innate to all humans, instinctively desiring a communal relationship with the rest of nature) as counters to dominant Western thinking.” (Hayden Fowler, 2017)
This year Hayden Fowler will be repeating his work Together Again at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. However, in Moscow he will be operating within a different cultural framework – using a Russian landscape, and working with a European wolf. Fowler will continue to challenge the boundaries of who and what is natural, where nature begins and ends, what once was and what remains.
Fowler has also been featured in ‘The Art Newspaper’, as part of coverage for the exhibition, click here to view the article online.