Agustina Woodgate: Ballroom. Peabody Essex Museum (PEM)

In Ballroom, the gallery floor is filled with globes that have been meticulously sanded to remove all traces of information, transforming what were once vital sources of knowledge into mute objects. Trevor Smith, PEM’s Associate Director—Multisensory Experience and Curator of the Present Tense, observes, “Agustina Woodgate’s erosion of familiar geography disorients us. Does her erasure of landmarks and country borders signal our common humanity? Or is the lack of familiar shorelines and mountain ranges a premonition of a world under siege from human carelessness? Ballroom allows us to sit in the space between these interpretations.”
Agustina Woodgate (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1981) also premiers a new video work that she produced with artist and programmer Błaźej Kotowski, in which artificial intelligence is prompted to recreate an erased atlas. The uncanny images that result provide surprising insight. The artist has said that “This system reverse-engineers the operation I did when I erased the Times Atlas of the World. It renders a new image of the world that is no longer an object of colonial expansion, but a combination of tangible geography, artistic imagination and neural net learning.”
On view August 3, 2024, through February 23, 2025