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An exhibition indebted to precarity, place and the contaminated diversity made by their often co-opting pressures.* The selected artists—En-Man Chang (Taiwan) and Jennifer Nevitt (USA)—embody, rather differently, creative practices that suss out the “sense-making” and “place-staking” contours that British anthropologist Tim Ingold clearly, albeit awkwardly calls “being alongly integrated”.

“Bathed in light, submerged in sound and rapt in feeling, the sentient body, at once both perceiver and producer, traces the paths of the world’s becoming in the very course of contributing to its ongoing renewal. Here, surely, lies the essence of what it means to dwell. It is, literally to be embarked upon a movement along a way of life. The perceiver-producer is thus a wayfarer, and the mode of production is itself a trail blazed or a path followed. Along such paths, lives are lived, skills developed, observations made and understandings grown. But if this is so, then we can no longer suppose that dwelling is emplaced in quite the way Heidegger imagined, in an opening akin to a clearing in the forest. To be, I would now say, is not to be in place but to be along paths. The path, and not the place, is the primary condition of being, or rather of becoming.” ― Tim Ingold

* It must be noted that the language in this sentence is not my own, but constructed out of the admiration and sense made from reading Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.

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Project support provided by the Visual Arts Fund, administered by Midway Contemporary Art with generous funding from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York.