This, though, is just one thread in an ambitious showcase that unites thirty-odd artists from multiple generations and disparate backgrounds. The exhibition is organized around four different banners or themes which in different ways blur lines, unsettling the easy dichotomies and Cartesian axioms of modernity: “the wild,” “the witch,” “the shape-shifter,” “the time traveler.” These, however, are very loose labels in a show that feels sprawling and overflowing by design.
Personally, I was drawn to those works that, rather than leaning into a sort of apocalyptic sublime, were trying to harness natural processes, if not establish an outright collaboration. Nour Mobarak’s (b. 1985) wonderfully uncouth sculptures grown from mycelium and ensconced in niches as if sacred objects and Anne Marie Maes’s (b. 1955) experimental leathers made out of microbial cultures, which together take up the most of the final room on the top floor, are less aesthetic objects to be contemplated than incubators of a world in which humanity has learned to work with, rather than against, nature. The same can be said of Aerogel (2003), Ann Veronica Janssens’s (b. 1956) brick made literally out of thin air.
There are many other arresting works on view. For instance, I was quite taken by “La Pensée Férale” (2020) by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané (b. 1977),a series of seven photos of Rio de Janeiro’s Tijuca National Park, one of the world’s largest urban forests, recently taken over by feral dogs—to the point where I found myself returning a few times to the accompanying texts by Juliana Fausto (b. 1979). In riffing off the story of these domesticated animals’ return to the forest, this series gives a distant glimpse of one plausible future that blurs the boundary between civilization and wilderness.
However, by and large, the context of the exhibition muffles the impact of the artworks on display rather than making them shine brighter. For starters, I feel squeamish about any project that proposes jettisoning reason at a time of increasing climate denialism and rising techno-fascism in the US and elsewhere. Second, such a framing tends to obscure the extent to which late capitalism relies on its own kind of magical thinking—something noted, for instance, by the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber, but even more evident in the unhinged techno-optimism of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. By over-identifying rationality with its reductionist bastard child of scientism, the exhibition foregoes those tools that could help bring its framework into clearer focus. As such, it fails to generate its own discourse and chart a path forward: as incubator of a new ontology, Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order fails to cast its spell.