Sensory Orders is an exhibition of 28 international artistic and scientific responses curated by Chris Salter and Erik Adigard. The exhibition asks how do we sense and make sense in times of extreme precariousness, tumult and uncertainty? Consisting solely of electronically delivered texts, still and moving images and sound, the exhibition as well as accompanying website and publication explores how three different “orders” – the symbolic realm of language and human culture, the technological realm of machines and the organic realm of human bodies and natural entities such as viruses, plants, animals and the physical-chemical matter of the earth itself – are fundamentally intertwined and sense, act on and affect each other. The responses in Sensory Orders cross multiple countries, disciplines and cultures. They come from visual and performing artists, anthropologists, designers, sociologists, architects, historians of science, composers, physicists, architects and other researchers and represent perspectives from 15 countries. While each voice is unique, all of the responses reflect on the entanglement of human, technical, biological forces that has always been present but which has been remarkably amplified in during 2020.

The texts, images, sounds and videos that make up the exhibition thus attempt to grapple with different ways of making sense in a world which seems to be constantly on the brink of change, disorder and uncertainty. Some projects focus on the personal experience of sensory isolation (John Aldemann, David Howes and Tereza Stehlikova) while others reflect on new forms of human-machine sensitivity that are arising because of technologies (TeZ, Saadia Mirza, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, Nerea Calvillo, Ben Cerveny, Christoph Engemann) or an emerging awareness of new chemical or biological conditions (Nadia Lichtig, Susanne Hertrich and Shintaro Miyazaki, Philippe Rahm, Michael Bell and Eunjeong Seong). Still other projects zero in on the sensory shocks that everyday life is increasingly delivering to us through the politics of artificial borders’ (Nitin Shroff), colonial legacies of occupation (r e a, Jennifer Biddle) or the increasing “othering” of the natural world (Wioleta Kaminska, Kurt Hentschlager).

As the wide range of responses in the exhibition seek to demonstrate, the separation between different sensory orders – human, animal, plant, machine and terrestrial – is not as great as we might think.

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