Hood Museum of Art Deputy Director Juliette Bianco and Senior Curator of Collections Katherine Hart worked together on the exhibition. Juliette said in an email, “Kathy and I are very happy to bring Ingo’s work to the Upper Valley, and we hope that visiting the exhibition is an enjoyable and provocative experience for everyone!”

Juliette and Katherine answered a few questions about the exhibit:

Q: Why did you bring this exhibit to the Hood?

A: When we first saw Ingo Günther’s work in 2016 while attending FotoFest in Houston, Texas, we felt its magnetic pull—we were drawn in by the luminous beauty of the globes and thought others would be as well. When we started engaging with the individual works and read the labels, they were simply addictive. The globes, individually and collectively, ask the viewer to think about information in an entirely new way, altering the perception of such issues as climate change, immigration, and wealth and power. 

Q: What do you hope visitors will get from the exhibit?

A: We hope that visitors are as fascinated as we were when we first saw these globes—that they engage with each other as they discover new ideas and questions while looking at the globes, and that they walk away with new ways of looking at the world and the contemporary issues that affect us all. Rather than thinking about the globe only as a static picture of natural and geopolitical boundaries, we hope that visitors will also think about it as a dynamic web of interdependent connections. Many of the topics that Ingo selects for the globes may be things we think about locally, regionally, or nationally, but we often do not consider them globally (no pun intended). 

Q:  Why did you pair this exhibit with the Mining Big Data exhibit?

A: We actually planned and organized these two exhibitions together. Amy Balkin and Luis Delgado-Qualtrough are both engaging with data about the Earth and humans’ impact and interaction with it in their work. Ingo is literally “mining” the UN and many other data sources for the World Processor series to create a work of installation art, while Amy is using data to enhance awareness of our impact upon the Earth’s atmosphere, and Luis is looking at carbon accumulation through stories, histories, and other data.

Ingo Günther: World Processor will be at the Hood Downtown until May 28. Workshops, lectures and special tours will be available in April. Visit hoodmuseum.dartmough.edu for details. Mining Big Data: Amy Balkin and Luis Delgado-Qualtrough will be at the Strauss Gallery, Hopkins Center until April 30.