In connection with the exhibition World Weather Network, Art Sonje Center will host Katie Patterson’s Burn, Forest, Fire incense ceremony and James Ringwood’s talk on November 9th.

Katie Paterson, To Burn, Forest, Fire Incense ceremony, IHME Helsinki commission in 2021
Dates: 9 November 2022, 6 pm
Venue: Art Sonje Project Space
Admission: Free
Registration: Google Docs on the museum website

To Burn, Forest, Fire uses scent to explore the first-ever forest on Earth, and the last forest in the age of climate crisis. Paterson and her studio collaborated with scientists to work out how to define the Earth’s first forest and determine what kinds of trees and plants grew in the Devonian forest 385 million years ago. They asked what living lifeforms today resemble those ancient species. Ecologists and biologists investigated living forests in danger of disappearing in our lifetimes. The scents of the past and future forests were transformed into custom-made incense sticks in collaboration with the Japanese incense maker Shoyeido.

*The curators of World Weather Network burn Patterson’s incense sticks together at the Art Sonje Project Space at 6 pm on November 9, filling the exhibition space with the scent of the forest of the past and the future.

Talk: World Weather Network—Weather Reports from Artists and Writers across the World
Dates: 9 November 2022, 6.30 pm
Venue: Mobile Agora, Space 2, Art Sonje Center
Lecturer: James Lingwood (Associate Director, Artangel)
Moderator: SooJin Lee (art historian)
Admission: Free
Registration: Google Docs on the museum website

* Admission includes To Build a Fire (2022) by MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho, starting at 6.20 pm.
* English-Korean translation will be provided.

When we think of the weather today, we no longer think of it as something happening to us. We are what is happening to the weather. Today’s climate is, as the American writer Elizabeth Kolbert said, the “Climate of Man.” In response to the climate emergency, the World Weather Network is an archipelago of voices and viewpoints from “weather stations” across the world.

James Lingwood introduces the network, and shares some of the observations and imaginings by artists and writers about their local weather and our shared climate.

The talk will be held in Mobile Agora of MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho: Seoul Weather Station, which is being held at Art Sonje Center as part of the World Weather Network project.

About the Artist
Katie Paterson
Born in Scotland, Katie Paterson is widely regarded as one of the leading artists of her generation. Collaborating with scientists and researchers across the world, Paterson’s projects consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change. Her artworks make use of sophisticated technologies and specialist expertise to stage intimate, poetic and philosophical engagements between people and their natural environment. Combining a Romantic sensibility with a research-based approach, conceptual rigour and coolly minimalist presentation, her work collapses the distance between the viewer and the most distant edges of time and the cosmos. Katie Paterson has exhibited internationally, from London to New York, Berlin to Seoul, and her works have been included in major exhibitions at institutions such as the Hayward Gallery and Tate Britain, London; Kunsthalle Wien; MCA Sydney; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.

James Lingwood
James Lingwood is a curator, producer and writer based in London. He was, together with Michael Morris, Co-Director of Artangel from 1991-2022 from where they produced over 150 major new projects with artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians from around the world. In 2021 he developed the World Weather Network with 27 partner organizations around the world including Art Sonje Center. Alongside his work for Artangel, Lingwood has curated numerous exhibitions for museums around the world including surveys of Vija Celmins, Luigi Ghirri, Richard Hamilton, Susan Hiller, Juan Munoz, Thomas Schutte, Thomas Struth and Robert Smithson.