Agustina Woodgate: Ballroom

Encounter Ballroom, an installation that invites you to interact with and navigate your way through a field of geographic globes on the gallery floor. Each globe has been meticulously sanded to remove nations and human-made boundaries. Is the artist’s erasure a utopian gesture in recognition of our common humanity? Or is it a dystopian premonition of the world being destroyed by human greed and human-made catastrophes?

For its premiere installation at PEM, Ballroom is installed with a group of historical navigation instruments drawn from the museum’s collection, many of which have long been outmoded by digital navigation tools. Accompanying the installation is a video in which the artist uses artificial intelligence to reconstruct images from an erased atlas.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1981, Woodgate lives and works between Amsterdam and Buenos Aires. She is best known for her public installations that address social issues by investigating the relationships between people and institutions. Her projects have been commissioned by the Bienal de las Américas, Denver; ArtPort, Tel Aviv; PlayPublik, Poland; DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Washington, DC; The Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Kulturpark, Berlin; and Mass MoCA, Massachusetts, among others. The artist previously exhibited a series of rugs made from deconstructed plush toys in PEM’s 2018 PlayTime exhibition.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website