Ana Prvacki
September 7 - November 9, 2025 | 601ArtSpace, New York
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?
Curated by Regine Basha