Moving through “Critical Zones”. The Exhibition as a Medium of Thinking the Anthropocene.

The exhibition “Critical Zones” (2020-2022) at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, was co-curated by two of the most influential thinkers of the Anthropocene in Visual Arts, Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour. Both passed away relatively shortly after closing the show. This survey included exhibits from (contemporary) art, science and intellectual history, and anthropology. The catalogue lists over 100 exhibits, including various large installations, that address the observation, the computing, and manipulation of the habitable critical zone of planet earth. According to the authors, the exhibition grew out of the need of scientists to collaborate with artists, historians, philosophers, and activists to sketch a new “earthly politics” grounded on the work of critical zone observatories and their insight into soil.

This paper takes this exhibition as a case study for an inquiry into the scaling of the concept of the Anthropocene within an exhibition and its aesthetic vocabulary. It argues that, in reference to the concept of the image as an “organization of time” (Gottfried Boehm), exhibitions aesthetically organize the time and movement of visitors and offer space for the aesthetic negotiations of contemporaneity. In consideration of Dipesh Chakrabartys hypothesis that the Anthropocene challenges notions of time in historiography, this paper traces the temporal aesthetics of the exhibition in relation to the geological time of this new era. My paper on the conceptualization of the exhibition as a medium of thinking the Anthropocene seeks to discuss the aesthetic potential of exhibitions to witness and reflect on the climatic change of our present.