The Scale of Things

Three moving image works consider relations between humans and non-humans forming an exploration through history, intimacy and spirituality.

Cooper Gallery is proud to present the Scottish premiere of Grace Ndiritu’s Becoming Plant (2022), alongside Saodat Ismailova’s The Haunted (2017), and on its fiftieth anniversary, Margaret Tait’s Aerial (1974).

The three moving image works are brought together by a desire to unsettle how we imagine and see ourselves as part of nature. Understanding the recurring need for intimacy, to feel a connection that is commeasurable with our ability to impact and control, the exhibition approaches desire itself; the desire to plunge our bodies deep into the earth and transcend the bounded individualism of being ‘human.’

Underscored by Donna J Haraway’s call to action in which “we become - with each other or not at all” the three moving image works reminds us that ‘we’ whether sprouting fur, feathers, scales or clothed in skin are at stake to each other in this moment of crisis and that our task, to paraphrase Haraway, is to “stay with the trouble”, to stir up potent responses to devastating events.

But as grand claims rooted in past taxonomies and abilities to measure fall away, how do we leave ourselves behind as ‘species,’ and reconcile the histories, identities and affinities colliding improbably inside our experience of the natural? Perhaps a passing answer can be elicited from the words of Anna Tsing who succinctly argues for humans to share their role as protagonist and accept with due humility that ‘there are other ways of making worlds.’

Acknowledging the ‘stunning frequencies' of the natural world ardently captured in Margaret Tait’s poem The scale of things, which the exhibition humbly borrows as title, the three works detail Tait’s ‘interlaced and inter-related’ possibility of ourselves as co-constituents of nature. This is how we might find the shapes, the sensations, and the stimulation to encounter all the souls of the earth around us ‘if you care to look’: this is the scale of things.

In Grace Ndiritu’s Becoming Plant (2022) six dancers reside on a demilitarised industrial site in a therapeutic group experiment with psilocybin mushrooms. With an essay voiceover by psychiatrist Birgit Bundesen and a soundtrack by GAIKA, their choreography and bodies embracing the consciousness of plants becomes a stark contrast to the architecture that surrounds them, constituting a catalyst for discussing wider social and relational issues of living in the age of Late Capitalism.

The extinct Turan tiger endures for the collective memory of the Central Asian region in Saodat Ismailova’s The Haunted (2017). Uzbek language narration by the artist connects the tiger to her great-grandfather in the Soviet era and to their shared oppression. Khudaibergen Devanov's archive footage reveals how cinematic language can hold multiple legacies from the colonial to the imaginary to the emancipatory.

Margaret Tait’s Aerial (1974) reflects on our position within a range of elements of nature for its short duration, from the meteorological to meadows, trees, worms, birds, and domestic animals. The energetic music heralds the absent auteur, whose incredible montage and sound mix created a work that resonates even more so fifty years later.

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The Scale of Things is co-curated by Sophia Yadong Hao (Cooper Gallery, DJCAD, University of Dundee) and Professor Sarah Perks (Teesside University).