Patty Chang & David Kelley @San José Museum of Art, California, USA

Project Exhibition "Beta Space: Patty Chang and David Kelley"

BANK is pleased to announce that Patty Chang and David Kelley's project exhibition Beta Space: Patty Chang and David Kelley is presenting at the San José Museum of Art in California. The exhibition takes the form of an open laboratory, Chang and Kelley’s newest multimedia installation features their first inquiry into a site without human inhabitants: the deep sea. Organized by The San José Museum of Art assistant curator, Juan Omar Rodriguez, Chang and Kelley’s exhibition explores the animal and mineral pasts, presents, and futures of the deep sea and urgently addresses the loops—of scientific discovery, resource extraction, and technological development—that connect us with the more-than-human.

 

Chang and Kelley’s four-channel video was primarily filmed at the International Seabed Authority’s (ISA) headquarters in Kingston, Jamaica and at the London Natural History Museum and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in England. The video’s filmed sequences and 3-D animations hold together the multiple time scales of the deep sea: the millions of years it took for organic matter, such as shark teeth and whale bones, to become potato-sized nodules of rare minerals critical for the deep sea’s biodiversity; 150 years of modern oceanography, initiated by the 1872 expedition of the HMS Challenger which discovered the mineral trove in the Pacific Ocean; thirty years of the ISA’s legislative efforts to permit commercial mining along the ocean floor; and the immediate climate crisis. 
 
The video is synchronized with a score produced by composer Yasna Vismale featuring drummers from the historic Maroon community of Charles Town, Jamaica; musician and singer Bongo Herman; and a chant from native Hawaiian elder Solomon Pili Kaho’Ohalahala(“Uncle Sol”). The sonic elements of Stray Dog Hydrophobia elaborate a genealogy of struggles against extractive systems—such as slavery, settler colonialism, and plantation economies—and foreground a range of human and more-than-human perspectives overlooked by the ISA’s legislative proceedings. Chang and Kelley propose other ways to live in relation to the ocean, “seeping and sealing living and non- living together,” as they imagine in this work.
2024.11.01 - 2025.06.01
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