Oceans of Air

David reflects on his first encounter with Tomás Saraceno:

We have a nanny, an Argentinian, who has taught our daughter to speak Spanish. That’s exciting for my wife (who speaks Spanish), but humbling for me. More humbling for me, is the way I became aware of Tomás Saraceno, the artist responsible for this exhibition. The Argentinian nanny, Patricia, told me of a work she had seen while visiting Buenos Aires—the sound of spiders spinning webs amplified to a basso profundo crescendo. I took little notice, but a year or so later a curator here, Olivier, took me to Saraceno’s studio in Berlin…

In this exhibition at Mona, you will find Saraceno’s contagious curiosity on full display. He is the creator of work so complex that he leads a huge multidisciplinary studio to manifest his vision, drawing energy and inspiration from science, nature, architecture, local communities, design, engineering, environmentalism, anthropology, music, history, technology… Come see Saraceno draw all that in, and turn out work ranging from the miniscule to the vast, with a kaleidoscopic array of materials including spider webs, radiation balloons, fine particle pollution from the skies of Mumbai, air samples from across Australia, dust from our museum, radio frequencies generated by meteoroids penetrating the earth’s outer atmosphere and recorded from the roof of Saraceno’s Berlin studio, flora from Mona, and the leaves of Tasmania’s only deciduous native tree arranged as a diptych, each panel displaying the effects of traditional and colonial land management practices. And as for David:

I now know why Patricia was so excited. The next time she suggests an artist, I’ll listen much more carefully.

Curated by Emma Pike and Olivier Varenne