Viewing What is Far to See What is Near: On Making Sense of the Planetary

2025

An altered world view is not merely the result of acquiring new information, but a question of how it reorganises conditions of sense-making, encompassing more than scientific knowledge alone. In dramatizing the interplay between epistemology and cultural beliefs, Warburg’s exhibition traced the evolution of perspectival frameworks through which ‘seeing what is near’ is mediated, and not simply an ocular sensory capacity. Seeing is conditioned by knowledge that positions and focuses it in certain historically attuned, culturally specific ways. In our moment, the climate sciences and their manifold, prognostic charts, graphs and models may deliver knowledge about a planetary condition, however we are only in the nascent stages of mediating the consequences of it in perspectival terms. In other words, we may be able to abstractly view the planetary, but are learning how to intimately see and make-sense from within its conditions. It is on this crucial point where the significance of aesthetic practices comes into particular relevance for us today: through what historical conditions is our ‘seeing’ mediated? From what perspective do world views mediate and make sense of what is seen? And through what concepts and/or assumptions do we draw distinctions between the near and the distant? Taking cues from Warburg’s prescient exhibition, From the Cosmos to the Commons positions public art as a means for mediating this continuum between knowledge and storytelling, between abstraction and proximity, asking how the planetary reorients world views, and what role art plays in experiencing these shifts in perspectivally, meaningful ways.

Patricia Reed, "Viewing What is Far to See What is Near: On Making Sense of the Planetary", in Stadtkuratorin Hamburg Online, 2025. Link