Tomás Saraceno: Particular Matter(s)

Tomás Saraceno: Particular Matter(s) features an expansive gallery exhibition as well as a newly commissioned sensory experience, Free the Air: How to hear the universe in a spider/web, a 95-foot-diameter installation in The Shed’s soaring McCourt space.

Through floating sculptures, interactive installations, and an artistic process that centers collaboration, often with spiders and their webs, artist Tomás Saraceno proposes a conversation between human and nonhuman lifeforms. These beings have been disregarded by humans in the Capitalocene, a name for the era of Earth’s existence that we’re living in, characterized by the destructive effects of capitalism on the environment. In a call for environmental justice, Saraceno also collaborates with human communities that have been impacted by these negative effects to renew relationships with Earth, the air, and the cosmos, particularly as part of his community projects, Aerocene and Arachnophilia.

Particular Matter(s), the artist’s largest exhibition in the US to date, brings this layered approach together, celebrating the complexity of our collective existence while looking for ways to live together differently. The exhibition features new and existing works in The Shed’s galleries and a newly commissioned sensory experience, Free the Air: How to hear the universe in a spider/web, a 95-foot-diameter installation in the soaring McCourt space. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue and a robust public program in partnership with the Columbia University’s Climate School.

Organized by Emma Enderby, Curator-at-Large, with Alessandra Gómez and Adeze Wilford, Assistant Curators