The Brooklyn Rail

Whether you like to call it Gestell, as does Martin Heidegger in his “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954), or “instrumental reason” as Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno describe it in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), the logic that defines modernity—its pervasive underlying orientation—reduces the world to a resource to be exploited as efficiently as possible and with little regard for long-term consequences. Spanning all the five floors of WIELS, Brussels’s contemporary art museum, as well as the nearby argos centre for audiovisual arts—Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order is a survey that articulates an alternative approach, at once documenting the destruction brought about capitalism and the “Great Acceleration” of the last eighty years and offering glimpses of different modes of being.

In the age of the Anthropocene—and with climate breakdown having turned from a looming threat into an everyday reality—this fundamental flaw in the design has become so apparent and inescapable that capitalist economics is trying to find ways to account for it. The recent groundbreaking The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review (2021), or the farcical idea of establishing a carbon credit market to manage CO2 emissions, are different ways to make economic models account for what so far have been considered expendable externalities. Further afield, the very idea of degrowth, with its emphasis on rerouting production to serve human flourishing while remaining within planetary boundaries, is an attempt to supersede enlightenment reason without negating it wholesale.

So tainted are the legacy and current image of modernity, with its associations with imperialism, extractivism, and environmental degradation, that the idea of exiting it altogether has become more and more tempting. Where modernity fetishizes Heidegger’s idea of techne, the ability to manipulate nature and bend it to human purposes, these alternative modes of thinking and world-making embrace what cannot be quantified or indeed explained and can be defined as magical in the way they seek to re-enchant the world. Relying on intuition rather than argument, they can’t match modernity as an all-encompassing “grand narrative” with a global and historical reach. They are by definition counter-hegemonic and often anti-discursive.

Upon entering WIELS’s exhibition space, the visitor is met by two different bodies of work that, each in its own way, celebrate the ability to make do and live off scraps. Hanging from the ceiling like a makeshift jellyfish, a sculpture and other “environmental abstractions” assembled from found acrylic by African American artist Suzanne Jackson (b. 1944) celebrate the untapped potential of recycled detritus. Close by, an installation by Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga (b. 1974) juxtaposes a scorched landscape made of a burnt tree and earth with a series of self-sustaining terrariums in Murano glass balls. Here Nkanga evokes a not-so-unlikely future in which life itself might only exist in terms of conscious human efforts to preserve what once was plentiful and taken for granted.

This, though, is just one thread in an ambitious showcase that unites thirty-odd artists from multiple generations and disparate backgrounds. The exhibition is organized around four different banners or themes which in different ways blur lines, unsettling the easy dichotomies and Cartesian axioms of modernity: “the wild,” “the witch,” “the shape-shifter,” “the time traveler.” These, however, are very loose labels in a show that feels sprawling and overflowing by design.

Personally, I was drawn to those works that, rather than leaning into a sort of apocalyptic sublime, were trying to harness natural processes, if not establish an outright collaboration. Nour Mobarak’s (b. 1985) wonderfully uncouth sculptures grown from mycelium and ensconced in niches as if sacred objects and Anne Marie Maes’s (b. 1955) experimental leathers made out of microbial cultures, which together take up the most of the final room on the top floor, are less aesthetic objects to be contemplated than incubators of a world in which humanity has learned to work with, rather than against, nature. The same can be said of Aerogel (2003), Ann Veronica Janssens’s (b. 1956) brick made literally out of thin air.

There are many other arresting works on view. For instance, I was quite taken by “La Pensée Férale” (2020) by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané (b. 1977),a series of seven photos of Rio de Janeiro’s Tijuca National Park, one of the world’s largest urban forests, recently taken over by feral dogs—to the point where I found myself returning a few times to the accompanying texts by Juliana Fausto (b. 1979). In riffing off the story of these domesticated animals’ return to the forest, this series gives a distant glimpse of one plausible future that blurs the boundary between civilization and wilderness.

However, by and large, the context of the exhibition muffles the impact of the artworks on display rather than making them shine brighter. For starters, I feel squeamish about any project that proposes jettisoning reason at a time of increasing climate denialism and rising techno-fascism in the US and elsewhere. Second, such a framing tends to obscure the extent to which late capitalism relies on its own kind of magical thinking—something noted, for instance, by the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber, but even more evident in the unhinged techno-optimism of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. By over-identifying rationality with its reductionist bastard child of scientism, the exhibition foregoes those tools that could help bring its framework into clearer focus. As such, it fails to generate its own discourse and chart a path forward: as incubator of a new ontology, Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order fails to cast its spell.