YUMA o la tierra de los amigos (YUMA, or the Land of Friends) by Carolina Caycedo is a large mural containing a series of satellite photographs mounted on acrylic. The mural contrasts and mixes multiple layers of these satellite images capturing the progressive devastation of the El Quimbo dam on the Yuma river (Magdalena), in the Department of Huila. The project was originally produced for the 8th Berlin Biennale, and developed out of the artist’s research into waterways, their political and cultural impact, and their historical development.
Noémie Goudal’s short film, Below the Deep South , is based on the work of palaeoclimatologist James Bendle who, while drilling in Antarctica, discovered coal beneath the ice. Bendle’s theory is that the coal is an indication that Antarctica was once a lush, green forested environment with insects and animals. It only arrived in its present position due to the shifting of tectonic plates.
Anointed by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and Dan Lin is a poem recital/video that addresses the American nuclear testing legacy in the Marshall Islands that occurred between 1946 to 1958 in Bikini and Enewetak Atolls. The artist’s words of resilience and healing are uttered as she travels across the northeastern atolls of her vast island nation. The climax of the short film takes place when the artist, holding white coral stones (a Marshallese funeral ritual) stands on top of the massive concrete dome erected on Runit Island in Enewetak Atoll to contain 73,000 square meters of radioactive waste—only a small fraction of the debris generated by the nuclear tests, the rest of which was never cleaned up.
Jes Fan’s video work Xenophoria , as opposed to the term ‘xenophobia’, refers to a love of the foreign and is inspired by the name of a mysterious species of aquatic carrier shell. This creature, Xenophora pallidae, calcifies free-floating objects in the water to its spine, bringing foreign bodies into its own structure. Likewise, Xenophoria stages a delirious search for the melanin pigment – the molecule responsible for skin color – as it manifests in both human and non-human bodies.
Aqua by Fernando Palma Rodríguez is an installation formed by four gourds and one movement detector that activates them. Once put in motion, the gourds open and close hinged hands that are cut from their bodies, catalyzing a sophisticated, choreographed conversation among them. Following Indigenous notions of personhood, Palma Rodríguez grants agency to ordinary objects and therefore the ability to relate to others—humans as well as non-humans.
Part of the exhibition PIÑA MATRIZ (2014) at Despacio Art, this untitled work by Carlos Fernández is a wood panel (formerly a section of a wooden table top) that bears the residue of insects interacting with fermented pineapple. The exhibition considered the production of pineapple monocultures and the agricultural monopolies for this product. Fernández used the exhibition space to portray alternative possibilities of diversified and ecologically sustainable production that could be mobilized in place of mass produced pineapple monocultures.
Produced for the Prix Marcel Duchamp and presented at the Centre Pompidou in October 2017, the installation Uncomformities is comprised of photographs, archaeological drawings, and narratives, based on the analysis of core samples from different sites in Beirut, Paris and Athens. The work questions how, at a time when traces and memories no longer exist, and the earth remains the only witness of our past, history is produced, and how the stories of our civilization are written and told. In each location, the artists collected soil samples, which they asked experts to analyze before creating a series of narrations and coded drawings.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
From afar, Chimeric Antibodies by Angela Su may look like scientific drawings or botanical illustrations. Yet, upon closer look, sexual organs and imagined human and plant elements start becoming recognizable, and realistic. Each intricate, large-scale drawing indeed mixes human body parts, machines and other organic constructions as they become intertwined and inseparable.
“There is a tapestry of sounds around us.” – Tania Candiani Tania Candiani has long been interested in Acoustic Ecology: the study of relationships between humans and our environment mediated through sound. A poetic text by Candiani narrated by writer and MacArthur fellow Josh Kun is featured in this three-channel video, For the Animals. The artist carried out visual research for the project: scanning, sampling and borrowing from books, vintage videos and images of material that informed her process.
Cardón Cardinal by Patricia Esquivias is part of a series of video works in which the artist develops a narrative in front of her computer screen. In this work, the computer sits on a covered piano keyboard, and the reflection of the artist is sometimes visible on the black surface. Cardón Cardinal is a collage of references that revolve around the removal and displacement of a 46 foot tall Pachycereus pringlei , a type of giant cactus also known as a cardón , from Baja California, Mexico to Seville, Spain.
To the Cardinal Gods: Central Axial Consecration (Site 6) is from a 2017 series made by Ren Zi during a residency in the Arctic Circle. The work reflects upon the serious ecological issues we face today. During the residency Ren Zi was joined by other artists, scientists, architects and educators exploring the high-Arctic Svalbard Archipelago in an interdisciplinary and collaborative endeavour to create work addressing such issues.
Ecotone by Enar de Dios Rodríguez is a video work presented in six chapters, each beginning and ending with a one-sided telephone dialog with an informal, friendly and conversational tone, that leads quickly into complex philosophical subjects. The first chapter is an introduction, and the last is an epilogue, and both employ interfaces (a smartphone screen, and an optical illusion, respectively) to invite the viewer to make conceptual connections across the chapters. An “ecotone” is a region of transition between two biological communities.
Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)
The virtual reality work Aquaphobia by Jakob Kudsk Steensen examines it’s title subject matter – the fear of water. Inspired by psychology studies used to treat aquaphobia, the work employs VR technology to merge imagery of past and future geological landscapes, as well as external ecosystems with internal psychoscapes. Steensen mobilizes the visual exploration of the fear of water to transform viewer’s perceptions on water-related climate change, such as rising water levels.
Ana Vaz describes her film É Noite na América (It is Night in America) as an eco-terror tale, freely inspired by A cosmopolitics of animals by Brazilian philosopher Juliana Fausto; in which she investigates the political life of non-human beings and questions the modern idea of the exceptionality of the human species. In parallel to the feature film version, Vaz created a three-channel installation format meant to be displayed in contemporary art spaces. This edition includes three complementary video works that expand on the conceptual frameworks of the film.
Santu Mofokeng is a South African photographer. Mofokeng was born in 1956 in Soweto. He began his career as a street photographer when he was still a teenager, then worked as an assistant in a darkroom and later became a news photographer, working on the Apartheid.
Ana Roldán’s Primeval forms series looks up close at the fecund shapes of plants often found in the artist’s native Mexico. These botanical portraits, like this one of the Pseudobombax ellipticum, or shaving brush tree, bristle against the edges of the image’s frame, fecund and wild, familiar yet foreign. Ana Roldán works in diverse media such as performance, sculpture, installations, video and collage.
Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings is a two-channel short film by Bo Wang and his frequent collaborator Pan Lu. It takes the history of the British colonial search for tropical plants as a starting point, revealing how early colonial rule and ideologies shaped Hong Kong through the Western gaze. Through the process of transporting and collecting plants, Joseph Banks, who was the botanist and naturalist of the first British diplomatic mission to China (also known as The Macartney Embassy) and advised King George III on the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in London with the most diverse botanical and mycological collection in the world.
In Luiz Roque’s short film Zero we follow a dog moving alone onboard an aircraft that flies over a vast desert. The dog seems tranquil as if keeping up with its daily routine in an environment in which the human presence is completely absent. The disturbing image of the animal left adrift — perhaps the only remaining living being in existence — is interspersed with the shiny mirrored surface of high-tech skyscrapers emerging out of the sand, in what might have once been an oasis.
Misting Miner is a vapor sculpture by Alexey Buldakov from the Urban Fauna Lab collective that gives material form to the invisible phenomenon of mining cryptocurrency. The work is comprised of a water cooling system attached to technology that continuously mines cryptocurrency, and in the process also generates an extraordinary amount of heat. As a latent and untapped source of energy, the artist harnesses the heat and reveals its transformative potential by turning it into fog through the water cooling system, which he then reroutes to follow a cycle of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation.
The Pudic Relation between Machine and Plant shows a looped scene where a robotic hand touches a “sensitive plant” — Mimosa Pudica, a species characteristic for closing on itself when touched. The name of the plant was derived from Carl Linnaeus sexual taxonomy of plants: pudica referring both to the external sexual organs, shyness and modesty. In a poem written by Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin’s grandfather) titled The Loves of the Plants (1789), this plant is associated, jokingly, with British Botanist Joseph Banks’s famous sexual adventures during his botanical expedition to the tropics.
Más vale pájaro en mano que cien volando (A bird in the hand is worth more than two in the bush) is part of a larger series of pieces developed by Sergio Rojas Chaves in Honduras in 2018 that engages with tourism and in particular amateur-ornithologists that overrun the country in pursuit of the nation’s extreme diversity of bird species. The works include a performance in which artist Sergio Rojas Chaves, dressed like a bird, observes the ornithologists as if they too are birds, another work features an audio recording of amateur ornithologists imitating bird sounds in the jungle of Honduras. This series of photographs was taken during an amateur-ornithologist research trip.
Produced for the Prix Marcel Duchamp and presented at the Centre Pompidou in October 2017, the installation Unconformities is comprised of photographs, archaeological drawings, and narratives, based on the analysis of core samples from different sites in Beirut, Paris and Athens. The work questions how, at a time when traces and memories no longer exist, and the earth remains the only witness of our past, history is produced, and how the stories of our civilization are written and told. In each location, the artists collected soil samples, which they asked experts to analyze before creating a series of narrations and coded drawings.
Sideways Time by Olivia Erlanger is the result of the artist’s interest in networks, seen and unseen, financial and ecological, the collapse of which has resulted in the fracturing of a middle class American identity. Consumption and the construction of value are a frequent concern of her sculptures that explore the structural friction between a public and private. Erlanger looks to the architecture that connects these systems for inspiration and in this sense, the language of scaffoldings, foundations and facades that percolate throughout her work.
Santu Mofokeng is a South African photographer. Mofokeng was born in 1956 in Soweto. He began his career as a street photographer when he was still a teenager, then worked as an assistant in a darkroom and later became a news photographer, working on the Apartheid.
Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)
RE-ANIMATED by Jakob Kudsk Steensen revolves around the haunting sound of the Kauai’O’o, a bird that became extinct in the year of Steensen’s birth. Its mating call, recorded and circulated on YouTube, where it has attracted hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of comments from viewers who felt the need to share their own emotional connection with this creature. For Steensen, the video exemplifies the way in which digital media experiences can serve as a memorial for a disappearing natural world, and how they can activate deeply felt connections with nonhuman creatures.
Wonocolo by Maryanto is part of a body of research and work that has been investigating the mining realities of Indonesia and Nigeria since 2015. This acrylic painting refers to ‘Texas’ Wonocolo in Bojonegoro, a traditional oil mine in East Java. Initially built by the Dutch and abandoned during Japanese occupation, it was revived under Indonesia’s independence (1949) and is now a controversial issue between local sovereign right and environmental concern.
Shot in Oliveto Lucano, a village in the south of Italy, AUTOTROFIA (meaning self-eating) by artist Anton Vidokle is a cinéma vérité style film that slides fictive characters into real situations, and vice-versa, to draw a prolonged meditation on the cycle of life, seasonal renewal, and ecological awareness. Combining fictional and non-fictional content, the film slips an interpretative script based on the writings of the painter Vassily Chekrygin, and the scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, within the context of an ancient pagan fertility ritual still practiced in the region. The film’s impressionistic plot revolves around the ecological dimensions of Russian Cosmism.
A minute Ago starts with a hailstorm pelting down unexpectedly on a quiet beach in Siberia. People, half naked, run for cover under towels and parasols, to the music of the Pink Floyd. The next scene is an interview of Philip Johnson, filmed 10 years before in the Glass House he constructed.
In the 2013 video work, Sitting Feeding Sleeping , Rose combines footage taken of zoo animals living in captivity with screen images that flicker and flash before us. In the narration, Rose talks about forms of life that are suspended and simulated—artificial intelligence and cryogenically frozen bodies, zoo animals and counterfeit ecologies. Through this montage of different types of footage and text, Rose poses us between the natural and the artificial, and speaks to the very strange moment of life in a world that is seemingly caught between the two, existing in a hybrid (though not necessarily symbiotic) moment of radical change.
Robert Zhao Renhui’s multimedia practice questions fact-based presentations of ecological conservation and reveals the manner in which documentary, journalistic, and scientific reports sensationalize nature in order to elicit viewer sympathy...
Rachel Rose is a visual artist known for her video installations that merge moving images and sound within nuanced environments connecting them to broader subjects...
Jakob Kudsk Steensen employs a formally rigorous approach to creating multi-layered VR environments that engage with the contemporary issue of extinction...
The photographic artwork of Santu Mofokeng (b...
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige collaborate as both filmmakers and artists, producing cinematic and visual artwork that intertwine, spanning feature and documentary films, video and photographic installations, sculpture, performance lectures and texts...
Through new media, installation, and video and film, Bo Wang’s practice embodies sociopolitical and cultural subjects in contemporary China and beyond...
Artist Tania Candiani works at the intersection of language, sound and technology, often mixing outdated devices such as typewriters or Victrolas with new custom-made electronics to create large-scale sculptures and installations...
Working primarily in video, Patricia Esquivias’s work focuses on the material remains of idiosyncratic occurrences that connect to larger historical narratives...
Sergio Rojas Chaves’s work focuses on contemporary depictions of animals and of plants and affective approaches to biology...
Futurefarmers is an international, trans-disciplinary network...
The work of writer, visual artist and filmmaker Isadora Neves Marques focuses on the politics of nature, in specific relation to ecology; economics; cultural production; and social and ontological segregation...
Jes Fan is a Brooklyn-based artist born in Canada and raised in Hong Kong...
Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner is a poet, teacher and performance artist born in the Marshall Islands...
Angela Su’s practice is derived from her two divergent backgrounds–she received a degree in biochemistry in Canada before pursuing visual arts...
Rometti Costales is an artistic collaboration between Julia Rometti and Victor Costales that began in 2007...
Brazilian artist Luiz Roque’s production consists largely of short duration open-ended cinematic narratives, in which he places mysterious characters (either gender-fluid dancers, famous drag queens, animals, landmark modernist buildings or historical artworks) creating dreamlike and sci-fi atmospheres...
Connie Zheng is an artist, writer, filmmaker, and field recordist...
Maryanto is an artist with a background in printmaking whose research-oriented practice is deeply concerned with ecological footprints and actions of humanity...
Chikako Yamashiro engages with political and social histoires of Okinawa to create haunting works drawing on oral accounts...
Olivia Erlanger is a New York based artist that works between sculpture and conceptual art...
Carolina Caycedo’s work triumphs environmental justice through demonstrations of resistance and solidarity...
Ren Zi turned to art after having spent his working life in the business of words, having previously worked in advertising...
Urban Fauna Laboratory is a collective founded by Russian artists Alexey Buldakov and Anastasia Potemkina in 2011...
Ana Vaz is an artist and filmmaker whose works speculate on the relationships between self and other, and myth and history, through a cosmology of signs, references, and perspectives...
Untitled is a black-and-white photograph of a wave just before it breaks as seen from the distance of an overlook...
Braga’s video work Provisão (2009) opens with a still shot of a clearing in a forest, shoots of grass emerging from a muddy brown patch of seemingly dry and barren earth...
Drawing & Print
From afar, Chimeric Antibodies by Angela Su may look like scientific drawings or botanical illustrations...
Ana Roldán’s Primeval forms series looks up close at the fecund shapes of plants often found in the artist’s native Mexico...
In 2011-12 the San Francisco-based collective Futurefarmers staged a 10-part series of conversations and collaborations with scientists, theorist, and philosophers inspired by Charles and Ray Eames’s film, Powers of Ten (1977)...
In the 2013 video work, Sitting Feeding Sleeping , Rose combines footage taken of zoo animals living in captivity with screen images that flicker and flash before us...
Drawing & Print
The three cut-outs are made of three aerial photographs coming from the archives of the Ecuadorian Military Geographic Institute...
YUMA o la tierra de los amigos (YUMA, or the Land of Friends) by Carolina Caycedo is a large mural containing a series of satellite photographs mounted on acrylic...
A minute Ago starts with a hailstorm pelting down unexpectedly on a quiet beach in Siberia...
Part of the exhibition PIÑA MATRIZ (2014) at Despacio Art, this untitled work by Carlos Fernández is a wood panel (formerly a section of a wooden table top) that bears the residue of insects interacting with fermented pineapple...
Created during Zhao Renhui’s residency at Kadist SF in 2014, Zhao Renhui began observing and cataloguing insects inspired by the scientific impulse towards exhaustive taxonomy of Sacramento-based Dr...
Aqua by Fernando Palma Rodríguez is an installation formed by four gourds and one movement detector that activates them...
The Pudic Relation between Machine and Plant shows a looped scene where a robotic hand touches a “sensitive plant” — Mimosa Pudica, a species characteristic for closing on itself when touched...
Sideways Time by Olivia Erlanger is the result of the artist’s interest in networks, seen and unseen, financial and ecological, the collapse of which has resulted in the fracturing of a middle class American identity...
The photograph Proxy II (Beetles) by Robert Zhao Renhui belongs to a series, titled Christmas Island, Naturally, that focuses on the ecology of Christmas Island; a remote volcanic land formation in the Indian Ocean...
Produced for the Prix Marcel Duchamp and presented at the Centre Pompidou in October 2017, the installation Uncomformities is comprised of photographs, archaeological drawings, and narratives, based on the analysis of core samples from different sites in Beirut, Paris and Athens...
Misting Miner is a vapor sculpture by Alexey Buldakov from the Urban Fauna Lab collective that gives material form to the invisible phenomenon of mining cryptocurrency...
Produced for the Prix Marcel Duchamp and presented at the Centre Pompidou in October 2017, the installation Unconformities is comprised of photographs, archaeological drawings, and narratives, based on the analysis of core samples from different sites in Beirut, Paris and Athens...
The film installation Mud Man by Chikako Yamashiro is set on Okinawa and South Korea’s Jeju Islands, two locations at the center of local controversies surrounding the presence of the United States military...
Anointed by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and Dan Lin is a poem recital/video that addresses the American nuclear testing legacy in the Marshall Islands that occurred between 1946 to 1958 in Bikini and Enewetak Atolls...
Advanced Technology
RE-ANIMATED by Jakob Kudsk Steensen revolves around the haunting sound of the Kauai’O’o, a bird that became extinct in the year of Steensen’s birth...
Más vale pájaro en mano que cien volando (A bird in the hand is worth more than two in the bush) is part of a larger series of pieces developed by Sergio Rojas Chaves in Honduras in 2018 that engages with tourism and in particular amateur-ornithologists that overrun the country in pursuit of the nation’s extreme diversity of bird species...
Advanced Technology
The virtual reality work Aquaphobia by Jakob Kudsk Steensen examines it’s title subject matter – the fear of water...
In Luiz Roque’s short film Zero we follow a dog moving alone onboard an aircraft that flies over a vast desert...
The Lonely Age by Connie Zheng is the first chapter in a trilogy of short experimental films about the complex temporalities of navigating ongoing environmental crises, as seen through the lens of seeds real and imagined...
Enrique Ramirez’s La Memoria Verde is a work of poetry, politics, and memory created in response to the curatorial statement for the 13th Havana Biennial in 2019, The Construction of the Possible ...
Shot in Oliveto Lucano, a village in the south of Italy, AUTOTROFIA (meaning self-eating) by artist Anton Vidokle is a cinéma vérité style film that slides fictive characters into real situations, and vice-versa, to draw a prolonged meditation on the cycle of life, seasonal renewal, and ecological awareness...
“There is a tapestry of sounds around us.” – Tania Candiani Tania Candiani has long been interested in Acoustic Ecology: the study of relationships between humans and our environment mediated through sound...
Cardón Cardinal by Patricia Esquivias is part of a series of video works in which the artist develops a narrative in front of her computer screen...
Noémie Goudal’s short film, Below the Deep South , is based on the work of palaeoclimatologist James Bendle who, while drilling in Antarctica, discovered coal beneath the ice...
Ana Vaz describes her film É Noite na América (It is Night in America) as an eco-terror tale, freely inspired by A cosmopolitics of animals by Brazilian philosopher Juliana Fausto; in which she investigates the political life of non-human beings and questions the modern idea of the exceptionality of the human species...
Ecotone by Enar de Dios Rodríguez is a video work presented in six chapters, each beginning and ending with a one-sided telephone dialog with an informal, friendly and conversational tone, that leads quickly into complex philosophical subjects...