Common Sentience

Curated by Regine Basha
601Artspace, 88 Eldridge Street, NYC
Sept 7th - Nov 9. 2025
View installation images here

Janine Antoni
Daniel Bozhkov
Zana Briski
Juan William Chavez
Ania Freer
Meditation Ocean Constellation
Goldie Poblador
Ana Prvački
Miguel Sbastida

Curator’s Statement

If the theory is correct that feeling is not located in the head, that we sentiently experience a window, a cloud, a tree not in our brains but, rather, in the place where we see it, then we are, in looking at our beloved, too, outside ourselves.
- Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street

I mix with the world which mixes with me.
- Michel Serres, The Five Senses

The experience of sentience—a word deriving from the Latin root word “sentire,” which means to perceive or feel—is to be aware of our own existence through our five senses. It is often thought of as the dividing line between human and artificial intelligence. Our innate ability to perceive, feel, and understand through our eyes, ears, mouth, nose, and skin places us in a feedback loop with the world, enabling us to experience and co-create reality as we know it. Common Sentience looks at the properties of the sensory faculties—essentially human technology—and how they connect humans, animals, plants, and planets in ways that we have yet to fully understand. In light of anxieties about AI’s capacity to acquire sentience, this exhibition asks us to first look inward: how might we better comprehend our own sensory mechanisms, which author Michael Serres describes as “the real interdisciplinarity of the body?” What is the intelligence of the sensorial realm and how does it operate relationally between human bodies and the rest of the natural world?

Renowned feminist quantum physicist Karen Barad posits that we are porous beings engaged in an active web of interrelations, or “intra-actions,” that form a relational quality between things. In this web of connective tissue, she points to the possibilities of a collective intelligence. In contrast to AI, the sensory information we absorb and filter is shared with the “umwelt” of other sentient beings (plants, animals, microbes) and keeps us intertwined in invisible but significant ways.

What clues might this kind of enmeshment provide for other, potentially more advanced ways of being, learning and communicating—modes of being from which the pace of contemporary life alienates us? And how might we better comprehend our sentience within a network of interrelations, rather than as an egoistic singularity that reinforces humanity’s domination of nature?

The works brought together in Common Sentience share this connection to “sentire,” also encompassing sense, sentiment, sensuality, sensitivity, sentience, even the antonym nonsense. The collection of video, glass, brass, watercolor, fingernails, light-sensitive paper, resin, linen, scent, sound, flora, sunlight, and paint asks us to consider how our senses intermingle with other networks of sentience, articulating narratives of sensory-related mythologies and connecting us to ancestral realms of signification.

ARTISTS ON VIEW

Janine Antoni

The exhibition includes “Mortle + Pestle,” a 1990s work in which the artist’s tongue touches the eyeball of her partner. This work can be read as a phantom limb for the entire show, in that the photograph elicits such a strong response within our own sensing system. Antoni’s investigation of the body and the sense of touch has manifested performatively and sculpturally over several decades. “Behold,” 2014, an object meant to be held and caressed, is available by request at the front desk.

Click here to learn more about Janine Antoni’s latest project, Here-ing.

Daniel Bozhkov

Daniel Bozhkov’s multivalent work encompasses scientific inquiry and absurdist tactics towards new ways to absorb and experience sensorial information. “Nepotism Project: Evidence of Special Privileges in Alternative Controlled Environments,” Bozhkov’s site-specific installation, features two French marigolds under grow lights, each with a custom sound treatment. The work references early 1970s experiments that exposed plants to sound and music and tracked their growth or decay. Adjacent to the marigolds, Bozhkov exhibits a painted sundial that traces the real-time movement of the sun’s rays into the gallery space.

Click here to learn more about Daniel Bozhkov’s practice.

Zana Briski

For nearly three decades Zana Briski has been patiently waiting in dark forests and jungles to commune and collaborate with animals. As a trained biologist and practicing Buddhist, she learned early on to be patient while studying nocturnal animals in the jungles of Borneo and to develop, one might say, her sixth sense. Briski’s artistic process evolved into unique photograms—camera-less images in which light-sensitive paper preserves a momentary encounter between beings in a common, intimate space. he exhibition includes “Mantis,” an early work, and a recent photogram of a grizzly bear. As she describes “Once the paper is in position, I sit in the dark and wait for an animal to pass by. Sometimes I wait night after night. I do not hide and I am in full view of the animal.”

Click here to learn more about Zana Briski’s project REVERENCE.

Juan William Chavez

“Survival Blankets” brings together natural and human-made objects that represent spiritual practices and daily life around ancestral knowledge, longing and recuperation. Drawing upon his Peruvian heritage for both form and iconography, Chavez also creates paintings of animal totems on raw linen with a cosmology that elicits a connection to animal spirits. In addition to his art practice, Chavez also runs workshops and programs within a community garden in St Louis called Decolonize Garden.

Click here to learn more about Juan William Chavez’s project Decolonize Garden.

Ania Freer

In different ways, the two short films featured by Jamaican-Australian artist Ania Freer, “Cotton Tree” and “Shango,” portray relationships to a sentient being in the form of a tree or a river. The main characters in each film sense the presence of a beloved nature-embedded deity in their midst. Freer’s delicate films bring viewers into deeply local zones of spiritual significance in rural Jamaica.

Click here to learn more about Ania Freer’s practice.

Meditation Ocean Constellation

Conceived and directed by Hope Ginsburg, Meditation Ocean is realized by the Meditation Ocean Constellation, an expansive ecosystem of artists, curators, writers, musicians, meditators, divers, and scientists. Meditation Ocean works toward human and more-than-human thriving through oceanic meditations and responsive terrestrial actions. "Your Deepest Ocean Meditation," Riane Tyler's offering, is one of ten guided meditations from the six-channel video installation, M.O. Turtlegrass Meadow, excerpted here as a single-channel piece. All ten meditations can be heard on the Meditation Ocean website here.

Goldie Poblador

Glass installation artist Goldie Poblador creates narratives that embody ancestral feminist mythologies with forms of flora and fauna from the Verde islands in the Philippines, an area currently under threat from pollution and climate crisis. The ongoing series, titled “Rise of the Medusa,” encompasses hybrid forms of goddesses and plants infused with a specific scent to elicit a sense memory of place, and to represent indigenous sentient life.

Click here to learn more about Goldie Poblador’s practice.

Ana Prvački

Ana Prvački works across media to unhinge our basic “man vs nature” binary. With performance, watercolors, objects and installation, she explores how our senses inspire behaviors, desires, and fantasies and sometimes absurd scenarios. As the granddaughter of a beekeeper, she often turns her focus toward what we can sensorily understand from bees, flowers, or sea shells, and invites us to understand how our own senses provide portals for joy and ecstasy.

Click here to learn more about Ana Prvački’s project Bee Intense.

Miguel Sbastida

Miguel Sbastida’s work, represented here by “While I breathe and the Moon drifts away from Earth,” reflects on how the earth’s systems are mirrored in our own bodies and vice versa in both scientific and poetic ways. The work on view features clippings of the artist’s fingernails as a lunar calendar. In his own words, “approximately, fingernails grow at an average of 3.8 centimeters each year, the speed at which the plates of the North American and European continents separate every day. This is also the speed at which the Moon tirelessly drifts away from us, moving away in its gravitational spin around the Earth.”

Click here to learn more about Miguel Sbastida’s practice.

Common Sentience

Image: Janine Antoni, “Mortar and Pestle,” 1999.