World of Matter: Mobilizing Materialities

World of Matter is a multimedia project providing an open access archive on the global ecologies of resource exploitation and circulation.

At the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, this exhibition will include a series of public programs that explore the ways that materials in the ground mobilize multi-scale geopolitics as well as transnational movements. This educational and artistic initiative is set against the backdrop of the Great Lakes region, an historical and contemporary hub of heavy industry, transport, and intensive material extraction. Artists, theorists, activists, geographers, landscape architects and architects explore the expanded role of the geo-, (as in Earth-based, geological, Earth systems related) as well as the importance of collective, cross-disciplinary investigation. The exhibition elucidates and responds to emergent geo-social-political realities and supports and extends existing dialogues and action within the Great Lakes region, reaching to the Alberta Tar sands and the Bakken oil fields. Artists in the exhibition include Mabe Bethônico, Ursula Biemann and Paulo Tavares, Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan, Frauke Huber and Uwe H. Martin, Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer, and Xavier Ribas. The exhibition is presented by the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, the School of Architecture, and the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Minnesota and is organized in collaboration with World of Matter, an international art and media project investigating primary materials (fossil, mineral, agrarian, maritime) and the complex ecologies of which they are a part.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website