11 - 20 April, 2025
Ensnared
343 George Street. Dunedin
Property Partner: Nanking Investments
Images: Justin Spiers
Ensnared was an exhibition by Kieran Dodd, Joel Field (Ngāpuhi), Nick Guilford, Harriet Hawksworth, Oli German-Ross, Luc Morley, Isla Thomas and Daniel Van Lith.
Their art project featured a range of paintings, installations, photographs, poems, and garments. As a centre-piece, Ensnared also included an interactive film, in which attendees could create and contribute their own artwork to visually depict a story about global crisis. Through this interaction attendees will feel bound to the moral of the story: “Ensnarement in the undying present explains our inaction.”
For many, global crises (whether climate, economic, social, political etc.), elicit a feeling of either anxiety or indifference, owing to its omnipresence in mass-media and it’s “undying” nature. Climate change, for instance, is an ongoing issue. It produces a gruelling, repetitive anxiety of an apocalyptic world that is yet to engulf, that refuses to change, and is utterly humankinds fault. This mix of anthropocentric guilt and an “undying present” (coined by Eric Cazdyn), sustains attitudes of either chronic-anxiety, or indifference (as a defence-mechanism). Both of these reactions are impractical in combating global issues.
Ensnared suggests a solution to these attitudes through a “reassessment of the present”, an approach advocated by the philosopher Ben Ware. Instead of repeatedly anticipating an absolute-catastrophe, this exhibition insists that we should refine our understanding of the time we live in: we have already experienced catastrophe, we live within crisis, and we are anticipating disaster. By accepting what we have lost, and recognising and appreciating what we still have, we appreciate a position in history where we can still make substantial change. That is, we become “unsnared” from the undying present and restore feelings that effectively motivate the adaptation and sustainability required to mend our world.
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