Agustina Woodgate: Ballroom
On view August 3, 2024 through February 23, 2025
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 What were once revolutionary technological tools are now outdated in the era of global satellite navigation systems.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 Błaźej 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
Images
Agustina Woodgate, Ballroom, 2014. Installation view at the Faena Art Center, Buenos Aires. Gift of Anthony Spinello. 2018.40.1-101. Peabody Essex Museum. Photo by Mariano Costa Peuser, courtesy of Spinello Projects. © Agustina Woodgate.
Sponsors
Agustina Woodgate: Ballroom is organized by the Peabody Essex Museum. This exhibition is made possible by Carolyn and Peter S. Lynch and The Lynch Foundation. We thank James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes, Chip and Susan Robie, and Timothy T. Hilton as supporters of the Exhibition Innovation Fund. We also recognize the generosity of the East India Marine Associates of the Peabody Essex Museum.
About the Peabody Essex Museum
Founded in 1799, the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, Massachusetts, is the country’s oldest continuously operating museum. PEM provides thought-provoking experiences of the arts, humanities and sciences to celebrate the creative achievements and potential of people across time, place and culture. By connecting people through inquiry, empathy and dialogue, PEM encourages an understanding of our shared humanity and fosters a sense of belonging in a complex, ever-changing world. We build, steward and share our superlative collection, which includes African, American, Asian export, Chinese, contemporary, Japanese, Korean, maritime, Native American, Oceanic and South Asian art, as well as architecture, fashion and textiles, photography, natural history and one of the nation’s most important museum-based collections of rare books and manuscripts. PEM offers a varied and unique visitor experience, with hands-on creativity zones, interactive opportunities, and performance spaces. The museum’s campus, which offers numerous gardens and greenspaces, is an accredited arboretum and features more than a dozen noted historic structures, including Yin Yu Tang, a 200-year-old Chinese home that is the only example of Chinese domestic architecture in the United States.
MEDIA CONTACTS
Whitney Van Dyke | Director of Marketing & Communications | whitney_vandyke@pem.org | 617-542-1828
Amelia Kantrovitz | Exhibition Publicist | amelia_kantrovitz@pem.org | 617-794-4964