As a child, I once broke a glass thermometer and the mercury it contained flowed into the palm of my hand. I watched a silver river circle my palm with each movement of my wrist and a cupped globule divide into tiny droplets when I probed its surface. Studying its glinting presence, I wondered if it came from the moon. The beauty and power the mercury possessed was bound up with the agility of its transformations. It evoked a sense of unending possibility, a rare quality that I later found again in contemporary art. Despite the long, dark shadow cast by its prejudices and exploitations, the art world remains for me a place where the wonders of material malleability combine with mercurial states of thought, pointing to the multiplicity of every encounter and the potential reimagining and restructuring of all things.

With this series, I have chosen to share artworks and artists’ lectures that plunge us into material-conceptual intelligence and the potent transformations they draw us toward. I want to highlight art’s engagement with “the riddle of ambiguity”—“the constant alteration of the relations between matter and words, time and meaning,” shifting focus to how art’s intimacy with materiality and media produces new speculations that are often in dynamic relation with, but of a different nature than, academic thought.¹ Even when they are “finished,” artworks insist on an essential incompleteness, a non-closure of form. More specifically, at this moment of intense pressure on mainstream institutions to expand and change their offerings, I wish to foreground how these qualities are present in practices that also work consciously toward political change. Too often, artistic thinking is overshadowed by critically addressing such artworks in terms of “hot topics,” creating a false distance from quietly philosophical works that are encountered almost solely in terms of their material-aesthetic choices.

Why do some of my colleagues’ eyes glaze over at the mention of politics, as if its presence occludes art, as if it leaves nothing to see? The memory of mercury in my hand re-emerged while searching for words to describe Sky Hopinka’s video “I’ll Remember You as You Were, Not as What You’ll Become”, in which we contemplate a vista of moving bodies whose colors are translucent, iridescent, and always changing. These First Nations powwow dancers are both evoked and manifested; their corporeal reality washed through like an old Polaroid that struggles to hold form. In so many of Hopinka’s films, form, color, words, and sound are in a constant state of alteration as he reflects deeply on the changing landscape of Indigenous languages, on myth and politics, on death and our inheritance of the earth.

We are now working in a time when art institutions have declared their commitment to cultural inclusivity and yet, while apparently “sharing” spaces, often perpetuate a climate in which various artistic enclaves limit their interrelationships to juxtaposition. Isabelle Stengers has researched this kind of impasse in the dynamics of (antagonistic) practices. Acknowledging the need for an ecology of practices—vital in an art world in search of its own sustainability. Stengers suggests that it is more beneficial to let go of the idea of new values, evaluations, and meanings replacing the old ones “in the name of a truth that one would have finally discovered” and instead to reconceive this moment as being about “the production of new relations that are added to a situation already produced by a multiplicity of relations.”²

I identify this production of new relations in the practice of Christian Nyampeta, which asks, not coincidentally, “how to live together.” Working across art, design, and theory, he creates conditions in which words seek the labor of re-invention and insist on leaving their temporal and geographic origins to wander in search of new meanings. In the brief interview with Nyampeta I share here, we can witness a flow of possibility between institutional exhibition practices and socially engaged ways of working, between the located and dispersed, the directness of material encounter and the fulfillment of durational unfolding. Staying with this mercurial flow of materiality, ideas and relations, we can delve into Sarah Rifky’s assertion of the malleability of institutional forms. In her rhetorical hands, concepts and political realities unravel like fictional weavings, showing their common roots in words, people, and ideas. As I listen to her different repetitions and reconfigurations of “institutions,” I picture clay being manipulated into constantly changing configurations; her mind-set a reflection of how the generative back and forth nature of material and theoretical competence.

There has, in recent years, been a proliferation of scholarship engaged with the materialization of all bodies—human and nonhuman—and an increased emphasis on the post-human performativity of “intra-acting matter.”³ Manuela Infante’s performance Estado Vegetal (Vegetative State) is an embodied and experimental space for this materialist and post-human philosophy; its vegetal structuring of words and deep rendering of plant intelligence into every element of its form brings home the possibilities for alternative models of self-governance and collectivity without recourse to theoretical explanation.

Are we entering a phase in which the political urgency to re-imagine and create new forms of living invites a more dynamic and rigorous relationship with materiality? My own thoughts on this question were echoed and extended by the reflections of artist Torkwase Dyson. In the lecture shared here, she speaks of shape as “an evocation of the human condition,” noting “the architectural infrastructural conditions” of Black bodies in movement through displacement, forced migration, and chosen journeying. Dyson draws a line between the art, architecture, and urban planning that underscores the current conditions for making, asking how we can invent a new language that simultaneously encompasses histories and creates futures. I am struck too by how artist Gordon Hall has re-imagined minimalist objects as catalysts for phenomenological experiences that might re-educate bodies to more profoundly feel the fluidity of gender. Dyson and Hall acknowledge the tradition of their aesthetics in minimalism and the history of art, yet they move forward, insisting on creating new languages that are equally rooted in abstraction and contemporary political conditions.

In Katarina Zdjelar’s AAA (Mein Herz) a woman’s voice becomes a mercurial flow, moving from one language to another, from song to spoken word, from one historic era to another, never resting on a fixed subject or position. The experience of listening to the work is a kind of expansion, an “opening stretched toward the register of the sonorous.”⁴ It constitutes a different access to self, not as a being but as a “coming and a passing, an extending and a penetrating”; a state of being that removes us from our ongoing act of objectification, both of self and of others. Encountering the mercurial properties of art, one flows from oneself, and this lack of hardness, this elasticity, forges a new breed of connectivity.⁵