The End Is Where We Start From

What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. These lines by T. S. Eliot from Little Gidding, the final poem, published in London in 1942, of the Four Quartets series, are the inspiration for the eponymous title of Anne Duk Hee Jordan’s first institutional solo exhibition in Austria. The End Is Where We Start From delineates a cyclical movement that is inscribed in the exhibition space both thematically and physically. “We are deeply connected with everything around us,” emphasizes the artist, “and to understand ecology we must think in continuous cycles.” Developed specifically for the KunstHausWien, the multisensory exhibition presents two worlds on two levels: starting from the Archean Eon, when the first life arose on the Earth thanks to an oxygen-rich atmosphere, the scenery transforms into a magical fluorescing underwater world that enables visitors to plunge to the depths of an ocean populated by fantastic creatures and microscopically tiny phytoplankton. Anne Duk Hee Jordan intentionally interleaves scientific knowledge with poetic imagination, links organic nature with Romantic visions of technology, merges the human with the nonhuman, and in this way creates an artistic universe imbued with a profound sensibility for ecological and social issues. In multimedia works set under and above water, nature is never just a “feel-good landscape” but a dynamic ecosystem shaped and pervaded by transiency, recovery, and new beginnings. As an exhibition, The End Is Where We Start From is a meditation on the cyclical nature of life, showing that every end also represents a new beginning.