Carbon, Carbon Everywhere

Integral to the constitution of our bodies, soil, air and some rocks, carbon is a highly bonding element that incessantly transmutes from state to state, each particle challenging the boundaries between life and non-life. Bringing together works by twelve international artists, Carbon, Carbon Everywhere explores the shifting states of carbon, an element that threads through organic and inorganic matter, linking bodies, environments, and temporal scales.

The title of the exhibition is a quote from the landmark essay titled Carbon by the writer and chemist Primo Levi. In the essay, Levi traces a journey of a single particle of carbon across distinct states and beings, from resting on a rock edge for hundreds of millions of years, to entering the world of ‘things that change’ – swiftly shifting from the atmosphere to the lungs of a falcon, to the sea, to the trunk of a cedar, and eventually entering the writer’s own body from a glass of milk on his desk. Resolutely specific yet universal, Levi’s story highlights the singularity of carbon as an element that inherently connects all things through its relentless transformation. It fossilises, mutates, preserves, pollutes and nourishes. From its ancient geological formations to its current atmospheric volatility, carbon is never still, shifting between forms and contexts in an ongoing process of exchange.

Featuring the works across distinct media, such as sculpture, painting, ceramics, video, installation, and material experimentation, the exhibition examines carbon through an entanglement of time and space. It asks how matter shifts meaning across bodies and systems. Making visible otherwise unseen physical processes of transformation and exchange, the works on view reflect on the notions of timelessness and change, preservation and destruction, order and chance, highlighting with palpable lucidity that everything is connected to everything else.