Divination through interviews and pennies
OBORO art centre’s double opening features two artists as they explore divination and future prediction
A trail of flattened pennies winds midair through the OBORO gallery space with a shadow of enamelled steel underneath.
In the next gallery space, an immersive video installation features interviews of people asked to predict the future.
On Jan. 25, OBORO, an arts-run centre dedicated to visual media and digital arts, featured the double opening of artists Yen-Chao Lin and Andrée-Anne Roussel.
“Even though the two exhibitions are quite different in terms of form—one being closer to visual arts, the other closer to digital arts—they share an interest in the subjects of divination, forecasting and the possibilities that looking toward the future can open up,” said Tamar Tembeck, OBORO’s artistic director.
Speculative Creatures
“I was interested in collecting all the possible ways to think about predicting the future,” Roussel said. “The spiritual side, but also the scientific and the financial side.”
Roussel is a filmmaker and new media artist. She developed her audiovisual installation, Speculative Creatures, in Manhattan during a residency at the Québec Studio in New York. The artist asked 25 people of varying backgrounds, including financial experts, futurists, AI specialists, psychics and clairvoyants, to predict the future.
When walking into the exhibition, their voices echo throughout the room, accompanied by visual projects that illustrate their predictions, such as financial maps and tarot cards.
What makes the series of interviews unique is the way they follow each other. Unlike a traditional film, Roussel didn’t edit the interviews together. She used an algorithm based on Markov chains, a modelling tool that predicts a system's state in the future. This produced a generative narrative structure that constantly changes the audio and visual sequences with each projection.
“In that way, I feel like I'm not saying that this way of thinking versus this other way of thinking—like science or spirituality—is better than the other,” Roussel explained. “The experience I was trying to create is the idea of being in the space and hearing a lot of different thoughts on the same subject, that sometimes are really similar.”
Summoning
Yen-Chao Lin is a Taipei-born, Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist. Her practice is tactile, mixing techniques such as copper enamelling, metal smithing, glass and ceramics to create installations, sculptures and experimental films. Her work often revolves around religion, spiritual practices, divination arts and sciences.
Her current exhibit, Summoning, showcases five years of her work. The central piece in the exhibit, “As Above So Below,” is a sculptural installation made from thousands of flattened Canadian pennies suspended in midair.
The artist spent five months placing thousands of pennies on train tracks and collecting them the following day. After collecting the pennies, she riveted them together into the final sculpture. The process was incredibly time-consuming: It took Lin four hours to complete just 24 inches.
Lin’s inspiration came from water witching and mining. She explained that she’s interested in what’s visible and invisible; what’s above and what’s underground. Water witching, also known as dowsing, is the pseudo-scientific practice of using a tool to find underground water using a forked stick, rod or pendulum.
“Water dowsing is not just for water. It's also used by oil companies to locate oil deposits,” Lin said. “During the Vietnam war, the navy was actively screening people with dowsing abilities to try to locate the Viet Cong tunnels because they were not visible to satellite viewing.”
Lin moved to Canada in 1997, where her first home was next to the train tracks. The train would come every day and she would put pennies on the track.
Despite the memory of flattening pennies being joyful, Lin further explained that the railroad is the colonial emblem of Canada.
“It provided the government at the time the legal framework to privatize Indigenous land through the Indian Act,” Lin said. “You can also think about the [Canadian Pacific Railway] and how it was actually built by Chinese labour.”
She explained that “as above, so below” also refers to things that are hidden, such as the history of mining or the mined materials themselves. Even the work she does to complete the installation requires a lot of invisible labour.
“There is a lot of history within the construction of the railroad and the railroad itself,” Lin said, “but then again, putting pennies on the tracks is a childhood game. It brings out a lot of childhood memories for a lot of people. So there's opposition.”
Both exhibitions will be on display until March 22.
This article originally appeared in Volume 45, Issue 9, published February 11, 2025.
