Bienvenu Steinberg & J is pleased to present Crude Gratitude, an exhibition curated by Alice Audouin, a leading pioneer in the field of contemporary art and the environment in France and beyond. The exhibition features works by Sara Favriau, Peter Kim, Haroon Mirza, Oto- bong Nkanga, Art Orienté Objet, and Michael Wang.

Is gratitude a new trait in the evolution of our civilization? Expanding to all life on earth and the cosmos, does gratitude signal a more ecologically minded world to come? Can contemporary artists linked to the environment be pioneers in this movement? The exhibition explores this potentiality by bringing together six contemporary artists who adopt the praxis of care and promote interspecies collaboration.

The artists in Crude Gratitude present an alternative lens to perceive the world, guided by care towards every entity, whether on a microscopic or cosmic scale: an ecology of empathy. Gratitude, a central tenet in most religions and philosophies, assumes a pivotal role. How might gratitude function as a tool in the realms of eco-psychology and art? Deployed as an antidote to the isolation pervading a world that was arrested by the COVID-19 pandemic, gratitude emerges as a salient response. This emergence coincides with an increasing awareness of the fragility of human existence, amplified against the backdrop of climate change, international armed conflicts, and the alarming decline in biodiversity. The six artists featured in Crude Gratitude embody a ‘world mentality’, a transformative attitude defined by Edouard Glissant, as an antidote to globalization, a reorientation away from the confines of human-centrism, where humans take responsibility as active participants in a larger system.

Otobong Nkanga places care at the heart of her practice to draw clear paths of resilience in an overexploited world. In Title TK, a van door and solar panel join to form a canopy, a shelter for sound. Created during a residency in the Canary Islands, the artist reconstitutes a landscape traversed by time. Here, she portrays herself in the present, framed by a distant past that embodies undamaged nature, and a future of destruction replete with natural disasters. The artist exhumes the shrouded parts of human history.

Born of a conversation with English choreographer Wayne McGregor, artist Haroon Mirza uses solar energy both as a sculptural element and as a source of light and sound. He combines his practice with anthropology to craft a novel mythological and symbiotic relationship with the sun, for which he imagines new rituals. For 30 years, Art Orienté Objet has been harnessing shamanic forces for the healing of human beings and biodiversity. This French duo, pioneers in associating art, ecology, and ethology, created three apotropaic drums for the exhibition, “awake, charged and alive.” They express their gratitude to environmental activists and whistle-blowers, including leading figure Greta Thunberg.

Their “Gratitude” extends to Aby Warburg, who was prescient about the current ecological crisis, and to whom they pay tribute to in a video for the first time translated into English. As a young New York state artist, Michael Wang adjusts the lens of the human gaze and consciousness to the scale of global issues. He brings focus to three major themes in his work: firstly, the ethics of inter-species relations, based on his research into the IUCN’s Extinct in the Wild list; secondly, the environmental transformations of major landscapes and natural sites, by disrupting the sculptural vocabulary of Lake Tai (China) with proliferating algae; and thirdly, the roots of the carbon-based world responsible for changing the climate, in the form of a tribute to its plant origins and the prodigals of photosynthesis.

Repriser le feu #2 is a site-specific installation created for the exhibition by French artist Sara Favriau. The artist selected and sculpted the scorched remnants left by the mega-fire that swept through the Landes forest in France in 2022; then she waited for the first thorn bushes to weave a braid as a new symbolic narrative connecting humanity and its surroundings.

Peter Kim, drawing inspiration from the ocean, channels the ‘oceanic emotions’ denied to him in his youth under the dictatorial regime in place at the time in South Korea. His practice is characterized by deliberate slowness. Through drawing, a diminutive use of color, and the attention given to nature and memory, the artist seeks a way of being to the world that is as fair and light as possible. He reminds us that nothing can be owned and that everything only truly exists through a revelation.

Awrion Laval-Jeantet & Benoît Mangin form an artistic duo that was founded in 1991 in Paris, France. They live and work in Paris, France. Over the last thirty years, Art Orienté Objet has worked across disciplines such as installation, performance, video, and photography, while always focusing on the living world. The artistic duo addresses the topics of biology and the behavioral sciences (psychology and ethology, which explain the strong presence of animals) as well as ecology and ethnology, creating surprising poetic artworks that are both political and visionary. In their work, Laval-Jeantet & Mangin strive to reach the limits of their conscience and convey a “wide angle” view. In addition to being a socially engaged duo, the artists are also researchers, lecturers, and activists who, rather than focusing on despair and anxiety, advocate for action and empathy in the face of the ecological crisis.

Born in 1977 in London, lives and works in London, Haroon Mirza began his career as a sound artist, for which he won a Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2011, and then accidentally stumbled upon solar energy as a solution to the lack of electricity in an exhibition space. After this experience, the artist began to use photovoltaic panels as a source of energy and as a sculptural element and to reflect on both the technological and symbolic place of the sun in a post-carbon future. In 2018, at Ballroom Marfa in Texas, his sound and light installation Stone Circle is powered by solar energy and is accompanied by solar and lunar rituals, and the promotion of renewable energy. For Mirza, solar energy increases the connection to natural elements and the cosmos, it inspires gratitude and brings a more balanced relationship with the planet.

Otobong Nkanga was born in 1974 in Kano (Nigeria) and lives and works in Antwerp (Belgium). Expressing an acute awareness of ecological, social, and geopolitical issues, Otobong Nkanga is an observer and repairer of a world marked by over-exploitation and inequality. Her visual research interweaves human history with the exploitation of raw materials, tracing paths of resilience. Combining art and craft, Nkanga practices tapestry, drawing, photography, installation, video, and performance... She blurs the usual boundaries of art to create workshops on soap-making in the circular economy, organizes multi-stakeholder conversations, or acts on the ground via her foundation in Nigeria. For her, time and care are synonymous, and giving care is giving time:

As artists, we take a lot of things from people. We extract, we take, we monetize. But what do we give back?

Michael Wang was born in 1981 in Olney, Maryland, United States and lives and works in New York, United States. A key figure in the field of engaged art, the American artist Michael Wang broaches the topics of climate change, the collapse of biodiversity, resource exploitation, the globalized economy... Considering these issues in their historical, ecological, and sociological dimensions, and linking them together, Michael Wang draws a “big picture” of our consumerist, energy-intensive societies and adjusts the human gaze and consciousness to the scale of global issues. His signature project, Extinct in the Wild, is about the flora and fauna that have become extinct and persist in captivity or as part of human activities. This work is part of a dream for a new kind of city: a city built not only for humans but also for other species. His goal is to promote diversity in all its specificity and multiply inter-species relationships through practices of care.

Sara Favriau displaces symbols and objects, often using humor, shedding light on the significance of chance, even accidental, encounters. Using a poetic and heuristic approach, the artist creates project works based on territories, unraveling the tangled threads and exhuming the charred traces of environmental upheavals. Seeking to bring together ecological, scientific, and socio-economic dimensions (sometimes in sharp opposition in areas such as logged forests), his works allow for a plurality of viewpoints and progress towards a shared common good. He uses a wide range of means of expression: sculpture, installation, performance, play, film, and even a pirogue tree that sets out to sea to find a forest.

Born in 1967 in South Korea, Peter Kim lives and works in New York. The line, time, origins, and memory: these are the core elements of Kim’s work, focused on retrieving the sense of reality in the collisions between space and form, between nothingness and matter, and detecting their essence in the outlines of timeless figures. Peter Kim is an artist who seems to like extended time, who chooses the line as the expressive code to give form to the finiteness of reality. His playing with the relationship between the background and the figure appears to reveal his wish to reconfigure a balance between the solidity and hollowness of form in recomposing an order capable of bridging the gap between time and memory.