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SALEM, MA – This summer, the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) invites you to reimagine the world of maps and globes in an installation conceived by Argentinian artist Agustina Woodgate. In Ballroom, the gallery floor is filled with globes that have been meticulously sanded to remove all traces of information, transforming what were once vital sources of knowledge into mute objects. Trevor Smith, PEM’s Associate Director—Multisensory Experience and Curator of the Present Tense, observes, “Agustina Woodgate’s erosion of familiar geography disorients us. Does her erasure of landmarks and country borders signal our common humanity? Or is the lack of familiar shorelines and mountain ranges a premonition of a world under siege from human carelessness? Ballroom allows us to sit in the space between these interpretations.”
Ballroom is installed in PEM’s Beale Gallery alongside a selection from the museum’s collection of historical navigational instruments, which have long been outmoded by digital navigation. “Across cultures and through time, humans have told stories to make sense of unknown environments or unexpected situations,” Smith says. “Centuries ago, mariners charted trade routes across unfamiliar oceans in the service of empires. What were once revolutionary technological tools are now outdated in the era of global satellite navigation systems. The seas on which today’s fortunes rise and fall might be made of data, but the stories we tell ourselves about where we came from and where we are going remain as important as ever.”
Woodgate also premiers a new video work that she produced with artist and programmer B?a?ej Kotowski, in which artificial intelligence is prompted to recreate an erased atlas. The uncanny images that result provide surprising insight. The artist has said that “This system reverse-engineers the operation I did when I erased the Times Atlas of the World. It renders a new image of the world that is no longer an object of colonial expansion, but a combination of tangible geography, artistic imagination and neural net learning.”
Born in Buenos Aires in 1981, Woodgate lives and works between Amsterdam and Buenos Aires. She is best known for her public installations that address social issues by investigating the relationships between people and institutions. Her projects have been commissioned by the Bienal de las Américas, Denver; ArtPort, Tel Aviv; PlayPublik, Poland; DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Washington, DC; The Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Kulturpark, Berlin; and Mass MoCA, Massachusetts, among others. The artist previously exhibited a series of rugs made from deconstructed plush toys in PEM’s 2018 PlayTime exhibition.
Agustina Woodgate: Ballroom is on view at PEM from August 3, 2024 through February 23, 2025.
Follow along on social media using #AgustinaWoodgate
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