Oxy Arts Reading Room

This exhibition is presented in collaboration with Getty's PST ART: Art & Science Collide and curated by Yael Lipschutz.

The condition of invisibility—and its counterpart, hypervisibility—has long played an important role in science, literature and the arts. More recently it has become the locus of some of the most pressing struggles of our time. Vulnerable populations around the world have long borne the effects of both invisibility and hypervisibility—increasingly so in the digital age of drone warfare, facial recognition and surveillance. The politics of the invisible also permeates the planet’s ongoing environmental destruction by human beings. Even if we have begun finally to acknowledge the reality and consequences of climate change, the complex invisibility of its causes and its incremental, often hard to see impacts–species extinction, sea rise, desertification—remain a constant challenge. 

Invisibility demands that we both recognize and attempt to think beyond our current conceptual limits. It is what science encounters when it confronts phenomena such as black holes. Ninety-nine percent of the universe, namely dark matter and dark energy, is invisible to us. Indeed the world is shining with things we cannot see. Once grasped as a challenge to an all-too human-centered worldview, invisibility can teach us to discover a multiplicity of exquisite visibilities–such as those of bumblebees, mycelium, and birds– that reveal the myriad blind spots of the human sensorium. 

This exhibition highlights the work of artists and scientists striving to render visible the people, histories and planetary conditions that have been erased within the cultural mainstream, helping to make legible the limits of our own conception of the invisible and its ecological and humanitarian ramifications.