Embodied Knowledge

Ute Meta Bauer focuses on three exhibitions she either curated or co-curated at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, a national research centre of Nanyang Technological University. Bauer positions curatorial and artistic forms of inquiry as a means of engaging with knowledge that is embodied in materiality. The exhibitions, Tomás Saraceno. Arachnid Orchestra: Jam Sessions (2015), Trees of Life — Knowledge in Material (2018) and The Posthuman City – Climates. Habitats. Environments. (2019/2020) all investigate diverse forms of materiality from substantially different perspectives, such as the communication between spiders and their webs with other species; the ecosystem of indigo, lacquer, rattan, and mulberry; and the urban as a terrain of co-habitation of life-forms. Bauer poses questions such as: what kind of knowledges are we producing in artistic inquiries situated in spaces of the curatorial? How do they serve as a knowledge container? And how do exhibition displays communicate knowledge in different ways? What is embodied knowledge and what languages, what forms of exchange, do they constitute? Rather than considering the enlightenment as the period that has lit up the world, perhaps darkness, the darkness of the ocean or that in a spirit-house, equally contribute to the transmission of knowledge.