4 Waters: Deep Implicancy

March 9 to April 20, 2019
Closing Reception and Artist Talk: Wednesday, April 17th, 7:30pm

Curated by Steffanie Ling
Co-presented with the Images Festival

4 Waters: Deep Implicancy is an experiment in collaboration that traces the striking possibility of a state without value. The artists’ research crosses four bodies of water—the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans—to connect four disparate islands: Lesvos, Haiti, Marshall Islands, and Tiwi. Each island holds within it stories of tremendous violence, but also the potential for otherwise. The film assembles fragments that touch on a kind of knowledge embedded in a moment preceding human history or geological timescales — a moment of total entanglement described by the artists as Deep Implicancy. In excavating the link between geological shifts and material realities, they ask, can an earthquake release the knowledge for a revolution in the very way we know the world?

While the artists consider natural disaster, resource extraction, and colonial violence they compose a framework of elements that displaces the privileged role of value in ethics, relations and knowledge. In its place, the film asks what kind of ethical program could exist without time, accumulation, and measurement, hence value.

An accompanying study room will contain texts, music and video footage from the past two years of Neuman and Ferreira da Silva’s extensive research, including material on topics such as coral islands, bacterial communication, and earthquake-triggered liquefaction in Haiti. This research archive will be activated through multiple events and respondents.