Mutter, Matter, Mother
Penny Slinger, Kali Konsciousness, 1976-1977 (detail)
To celebrate Earth Day, Blum & Poe Broadcasts is pleased to present the online group exhibition Mutter, Matter, Mother, organized by Naz Cuguoglu, featuring works by Theodora Allen, March Avery, Mohamed Bourouissa, Sam Durant, Anya Gallaccio, Yukie Ishikawa, Mimi Lauter, Dave Muller, Solange Pessoa, Nobuo Sekine, Penny Slinger—artists who imagine an ecofeminist future through materials and thematic concerns in their practices.
“Planting seeds requires medium, soil, matter, mutter, mother,” writes the ecofeminist thinker Donna Haraway in her book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016).* Pairing artworks with selected quotes from this text, the exhibition builds global, cross-species kinships to conjure a flourishing future. This is a speculative narrative and the protagonists are our non-human allies, including plants, stones, and rivers. Holding open space for another, they lead the way to our collaborative survival—a practice of caring.
Mutter, Matter, Mother marks the six-year anniversary of the gallery’s participation in Arts Earth Partnership (AEP), and Blum & Poe’s incentives in becoming one of the first green-certified contemporary art galleries in the United States. Committed to facilitating a more sustainable art world, the gallery also recently became a member of the Gallery Climate Coalition, a collaborative act to reduce the industry’s carbon footprint.
As part of this online exhibition, Dave Muller’s 15-part work Bloom Spiel (2014) will be installed at Blum & Poe Los Angeles. Muller also created a playlist to accompany the exhibition which can be accessed here, and in the gallery via QR code.
A portion of sales from this show will be donated to Sunrise Movement—a youth movement to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process.
To accompany the exhibition, curator Stephanie Cristello selected a quote from Theodora Allen's forthcoming monograph Saturnine, written by Cristello and produced on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark. Access the reading here.
*Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).