Inspired by environmental activist and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy, our exhibition World As Lover, World As Self turns to contemporary art to help us to “relinquish our separateness” and take account of the residue of the world that we think we know. Our program does this through the concept of defamiliarization as a means to “turn the familiar strange,” to redefine the self and our subsequent community. Defamiliarization, or aesthetic distance, is a literary and artistic technique coined by Russian Formalists during the outbreak of the 1918 flu pandemic. According to the formalists, the technique uses language in a way that ordinary objects are made to be reconsidered, that what is in front of us might surpass our assumptive narratives. How can bodies, technologies and modes of being, be taken outside of predefined cultural presumptions in order to de-categorise, to shapeshift, to morph, to glimmer, to shimmer. In this program, we estrange, not to create a ‘foreign’ or ‘other’ but to radically rethink community, to engage with the World as Lover, and as Self.

Over the course the year we have invited several artists for exhibition chapters that fade in and out of each other. As a format, we see the chapters crossing over as similar to the crossfade in film or in music. The artworks will intermingle, creating entangled relationships and networks of associations. In typical Shimmer fashion, the program means that we will restart the event program Sunday Morning With, add new readings to Across The Way With, and begin publishing ephemera and small books. More information on all the artists and contributors will be announced as the program unfolds.