Joan Jonas

Joan Jonas is very well known for her incredible performance works, as well as videos and drawings. For this exhibition, we chose two recent works: the video of the birth of a whale and a manta ray fish portrait drawing. These two works embody her incredible research on sensorialising the world, making it clear that animals feel joy and pain, and therefore deserve our full care and attention.

The whale video is a collaboration with marine biologist David Gruber, who has made a significant contribution to art and science through the documentation of a sperm whale birth. This event, captured off the coast of Dominica, represents the first scientific recording of a sperm whale birth since 1986. This rare documentation has been integrated into Jonas’s work, To Touch Sound, in 2024. The immense beauty of this video relies on the fact that, to survive, the baby whale needs to be sustained by family members. When a female sperm whale gives birth, she is often surrounded by female relatives and pod members, who provide support and protection – a phenomenon known as “assisted birth” or alloparental care. Mutuality, lifelong bonds, matrilineal society, shared learning, deep emotional connection, all these elements are present in this video and all the works of Joan Jonas. The same applies to her drawings. Fishes are often described and portrayed in schools, as groups, as if their individual existence were of a different kind. Her drawings are an incredible collection of individual portrayals of fish, like this manta ray. Jonas has used animals like manta rays as symbols of fluidity, transformation, and the interconnectedness of life. The manta ray, with its graceful, expansive movements, often serves as an evocative motif in her larger body of work that explores the themes of motion, space, and the oceanic environment.

Both works constitute a sort of “hidden well” for the whole exhibition. They emanate depth, transformation, hidden knowledge, and intelligence. They embody gateways to the unknown realms of the possible, of a life without violence, of an intelligence that only knows of love.

© Joan Jonas/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery.