For its fourth Edition, the Uqbar Biennale pursues Karl Blossfeldt’s vision of nature as a “primeval force.” Exploiting its metafictional virtue, Natureworks: The Next Revolution takes Blossfledt’s creative process to a higher level by turning the Museum inside-out. Exposing the museum’s interior directly to nature removes the aesthetic/conceptual context in which nature has been colonized since the renaissance, leaving only a heightened awareness of what Blossfeldt called the foundation of all form.

The exhibition presents a single art object, namely the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. The Museum will undergo one simple modification. We have lifted the roof to let nature in and instructed the museum staff to cease sanitizing the five gallery spaces Uqbar will occupy for the duration of this exhibit.  

Natureworks: The Next Revolution was first inspired by a vision of an exhibit of landscape photographs where small rectangles of controlled and extracted nature hang on the walls of a white cube. In this we saw the relationship between the two cerebral hemispheres. The landscape photographs represent the sensing, experiential right brain which thrives upon connection to the world living in a cage built by the linear and rational left brain. The right brain can be seen as a microcosm of nature within us. Since it operates in a nonlinear fashion, it is often compared to a parallel processor; yet it is more likely that the current that carries associations, shapes, sounds and memory through its neural pathways is precisely the same “primeval force” that dries algae along the shore or directs the crow across the sky. Given the fact that the dominant left brain is also the architect of civilization, our world is more or less a white cube. The revolution the title refers to is within us.  

The works exhibited are direct transcriptions of the “primeval force” of the world. The Museum itself might be seen as a metaphor for a future civilization in which the two hemispheres of the brain have equal standing.