Antonia Nisbet’s exhibition, Arriving in Stages, engages language as both an ethical and aesthetic mode for practising response-ability with and for each other as we face a world in trouble.  Referencing the Doomsday Clock—with its current estimate of 85 seconds to midnight—the exhibition acknowledges the high stakes of our current geopolitical and socio-political conditions, while refusing to be fully consumed by them.

With humour and wit, Nisbet develops a distinct vernacular for art making which is both materially and conceptually driven. Her installations combine text, banners, printed ephemera, and a range of participatory formats to register daily, provisional modes of coping. Through improvised, accumulative, and durational processes, Arriving in Stages investigates the relationship between socio-political events and personal civic social response, cohering as a system of artworks that are concurrently provisional, critical, and temporally responsive. In this way, the project asks what forms of attention, such as care, repair, love, and commitment, remain possible here and now.

Arriving in Stages is the culmination of Antonia Nisbet’s PhD studies.