»Ballroom«: a world without national borders

What do globes that no longer contain references to land, water and man-made boundaries mean? Do they represent a world that has been destroyed by humans, or do they symbolize human unity? Argentinian artist Agustina Woodgate raises these questions with her installation Ballroom (2014) and invites visitors to interact with her artwork. In the exhibition Agustina Woodgate: Ballroom at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, the polished globes are accompanied by historical navigation devices from the museum's collection. Woodgate also presents a new video work created in collaboration with Błaźej Kotowski: an AI was tasked with recreating an atlas whose map representations had been sanded down. It is a continuation of Woodgate's Time Atlas of the World (2012), in which she erased the images from an atlas. The exhibition runs from August 3, 2024 to February 23, 2025.

Woodgate (*1981) comes from Buenos Aires and lives and works there and in Amsterdam. She is known for artworks and public installations that shed light on social problems from a different perspective. Globes, for most people immovable representations of the world and overviews of the various countries, are in fact testimonies to colonial history, as Woodgate points out.