HESSE FLATOW is pleased to present Augurhythms, a group exhibition organized by the The Fragile Institute, for the purpose of studying forms of material and visual divinations through rhythms of the body, nature, and nascent explorations of ritual practices. The exhibition includes the work of Earth Aengel, Suzanne Anker, Phong Bui, Geoff Chadsey, Justin Cloud, Coleman Collins, Theresa Daddezzio, Angela Dufresne, Lauren Fejarang, Sasha Fishman, Kara Gut, Ronald Hall, Anthony Hawley, Fox Hysen, Mala Iqbal, Myeongsoo Kim, Mo Kong, Michael Jones McKean, Lubos Plny, Nevena Prijic, Erik Probst, Timur Si-Qin, Karinne Smith, Jane South, Peat Szilagyi, Didier William, and Andrew Woolbright with performances by Kara Gut and Peat Szilagyi. The artists of Augurhythmsseek to expand the interconnectedness of all living things, what was classically referred to as the anima mundi, to include technology, information, and the metaphysical realm within its definition, finding moments of transmission between the material and the informational.
Katherine Hayles described the posthuman subject as “an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity.” The ancient haruspex prefigured this material-informational entity, able to see the future in the entrails of an animal; while the augur could see it in the flightpaths of birds. Hieronymus Bosch’s The Forest That Hears and The Field That Sees (c. 1500) was another material-informational palimpsest, a visual channel to the ancient knowing of the world, and the animistic technologies of the forest to understand, determine, and engineer itself. Where David Joselit introduced the idea that art, specifically painting, is a form of speculating on time, the artists of Augurhythms disengage it from its language and proximity to the world of finance to connect it to a more metaphysical context of material and bodily divination–something that is more than trend forecasting but suspicious of the adoption of overt languages of spiritualism or paganism.