Metahaven: Capture (2022), production still, single-channel film work, color, sound. Italian, French, English, subtitles in English. Capture was created in 2022 by Metahaven, co-commissioned by Kunsthall Trondheim, Screen City Biennial and Arts at CERN. With additional support from KORO and Arts and Culture Norway. Arts at CERN is supported by UNIQA Fine Art Insurance, Switzerland. This film was supported by the Netherlands Film Fund. Additional support from La Palma Escuela de Cultura e Instituto canario de desarrollo cultural.
Metahaven is an Amsterdam-based artist collective working in film, textile, graphic design, and other media. Their first solo exhibition in Norway at Kunsthall Trondheim centers on the newly commissioned film Capture (2022). The film explores fundamental questions in philosophy, science, and everyday life, including: What is reality? How do we define consciousness? What constitutes knowledge?
Roughly organized around three interconnected fields of research, Capture brings together imagery of lichens filmed in the forests near Trondheim, footage from the vast film archive of CERN (the European Organization of Nuclear Research) in Geneva, and bats. These nocturnal mammals use echolocation to orient themselves, which prompted the philosopher Thomas Nagel in 1974 to write an essay asking “What is it like to be a bat?”. While bats are mammals like ourselves, they have very different sensory capacities. But even if we cannot ourselves experience what it is like to be a bat, we can know that the sound that they use in echolocation is a wave phenomenon. Nagel further states that he believes in the existence of facts that we might not be able to comprehend. For example, if someone locks a caterpillar in a sterile safe and recovers a butterfly upon returning, that person could either know that the butterfly is, or once was, the caterpillar. Or they could come to the conclusion that a parasite inside the caterpillar ate it and turned into the butterfly.
Metahaven draw a connection between Nagel’s bat and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, where the existence of the Higgs boson, the first and only elementary scalar particle observed to date, was confirmed in 2012. To confirm the theoretically predicted boson, it had to be created in an experimental set-up by colliding particles at close to the speed of light. But even though the Higgs boson was confirmed, we still do not know what its properties are—reminiscent of Nagel’s butterfly.
The third element in Capture are lichens, which Metahaven filmed during a field visit to Trondheim. Lichens are composite organisms consisting of fungi and algae, or cyanobacteria. Researchers today propose lichens as biosensors capable of sensing pollution in more indicative ways than most technical instruments. Lichens are affected by the same climate change that they measure, while they also further change that reality through photosynthesis. They promise more ecological modes of (environmental) politics that are based in relations. Similarly, a camera is not passively filming, but affecting—if not creating—its reality, in ways analogous to how the Higgs boson was created in the process of its confirmation.
In Chaos Theory (2021), a film also on view at the Kunsthall, Metahaven embrace the impossibility of fully grasping reality and the uncertainty this engenders by looking at the process of parenting. Shown together with the two films is a series of textile works. Woven on a Jacquard loom, these works collage a digital grid with rendered shapes resembling geological formations, graphic symbols turning on a spatial axis, and a target dissolving or perhaps exploding. A series of stitchings on plastic bags display abstracted organizational logos or the “play” symbol from YouTube. These works address networked communication technologies where user-generated content democratizes claims to truth and reality, but which are at the same time also vulnerable to propaganda.
Through their films, textile works, and collages, Metahaven’s exhibition grapples with fundamental questions concerning reality, knowledge, and consciousness in both speculative deeply implicated ways.
-Curator Stefanie Hessler, former Director of Kunsthall Trondheim
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The work of the Amsterdam-based artist collective Metahaven consists of filmmaking, writing, and design. Films by Metahaven include Chaos Theory (2021), Hometown (2018), and Information Skies (2016). Metahaven has participated in group exhibitions at Artists Space, New York, the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, the Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, the Busan Biennale, Busan, the Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah, and M HKA, Antwerp, among others, and solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, Izolyatsia, Kyiv, ICA London, e-flux, New York, and State of Concept Athens, among others. Their work is in collections of the Sharjah Art Foundation, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the Victoria & Albert Museum, among others. Recent publications include the book-length essay Digital Tarkovsky (2018).
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Capture was created in 2022 by Metahaven, co-commissioned by Kunsthall Trondheim, Screen City Biennial and Arts at CERN. With additional support from KORO and Arts and Culture Norway. Arts at CERN is supported by UNIQA Fine Art Insurance, Switzerland.This film was supported by the Netherlands Film Fund.Additional support from La Palma Escuela de Cultura e Instituto canario de desarrollo cultural.