The Incubation Series Opening Reception of "Novum"

Practice Gallery (319 N 11th St)

"Novum" is an exhibition about looking at the everyday anew. The term novum, literally “new thing” in Latin, was coined by Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch to describe how a truly novel concept or structure can provoke one to radically reassess reality. Artists Sol Kim, Cacie Jackson, and Noa Mori Machover have created novum that invite viewers to rethink quotidian entities (like cleaning robots, car parts, and even protest movements) as contingent processes rather than inevitable outcomes. Each artist shares a practice of deep research but explores their object of inquiry through a different medium, spanning video, sculpture, and print. The results embrace defamiliarization and reimagination; these artworks reveal vast yet unseen networks of knowledge and labor that enable robots to think, cars to run, and activists to envision a new world. "Novum" insists on the transformative power of sustained attention, on embracing the curiosity of life as we know it. 

The exhibition presents the work of second-year MFA candidates at the University of Pennsylvania. It is co-curated by Elliott Loft, Sawyer Taylor-Arnold, and Avani Sastry, graduate students in the History of Art department at Penn. Novum is the twenty-seventh exhibition of the Incubation Series, a student-led initiative that fosters new ways of making, exhibiting, and seeing art. This exhibition is made possible with the generous support of the Katherine Stein Sachs CW’69 and Keith L. Sachs W’67 Expendable Program Fund, the Department of History of Art at the School of Arts and Sciences, the Department of Fine Arts at the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, and the College Center for Visual Culture and the Department of the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College.