Beyond Language: Knowing with Abiota in Contemporary Installation Art

Abstract

This article scrutinises contemporary installation art that foregrounds non-linguistic ways of knowing with abiotic entities. The main focus is put on affective modes of sense-making which stage non-anthropocentric relationalities between humans and nonhumans in order to examine how those modes relate to more articulate forms of knowing. The article adopts a perspective of situated knowing (Bal and Chaberski 2020) either focusing on the author’s own or other’s spectatorial experiences. Specifically, three artistic projects mobilising different abiota are discussed to elucidate their implications with respect to affective and discursive knowing as well as the different aspects of abiotic ways of being that they account for.