Group exhibition focuses on green and political issues

The unusual group exhibition Imminent and Eminent Ecologies in the dedicated gallery for UJ’s fine art, design and architecture faculty sets out to showcase a new art initiative, Bio Art + Design Africa. It is primarily intended to generate artistic research about the question of human impacts on natural ecosystems.

Beyond the obvious and cataclysmic impact of industrial culture on the natural world, the artistic research emerging from this new initiative focuses on other natural or adaptive ecosystems that seldom attract the attention of visual artists — everything from microbial cultures to waveforms. In doing so it hopes to foreground the effect culture has on climate change and the destruction or adaptation of ecosystems that are seldom considered or even noticed by human society.

The bio art initiative launched last year with the completion of a microbiology laboratory dedicated to the production of bio art and design, and an accompanying curated group exhibition. This second group exhibition, Imminent and Eminent Ecologies, curated by Leora Farber and Brenton Maart, brings together work that attempts to raise awareness of urgent environmental and political issues. As the curators put it, the show is an attempt “to reimagine our current and future ecologies from decolonial, Africanised perspectives”.

Comprising the work of artists-in-residence in the bio art programme, as well as researchers and invited artists, the exhibition includes some well-known names in SA contemporary art: Adam Broomberg and Rafael Gonzalez; Janneke de Lange; Stacy Hardy; Russel Hlongwane, Francois Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson; Dean Hutton; Bronwyn Katz; Nandipha Mntambo; Miliswa Ndziba; Uriel Orlow; Theresa Schubert; and Louise Westerhout.

Video and installation work predominates; video highlights range from The Glacier Trilogy by Theresa Schubert, which uses AI to envision the huge impact of climate destruction on glaciers and their fluvial water systems, to an intriguing work by Stacy Hardy, My Country is Full of Holes, and so is My Body, a video-based collaboration with well-known sound artist James Webb focused on the connections between excavation of the landscape and the huge toll this takes on the lungs of generations of miners.

A highlight installation work is !Khᾱllaab (Flowering Season) by Bronwyn Katz, recently shown at Stevenson Gallery. This arresting work arranges driftwood from “alien” species, arranged on a wall to form a new kind of constellation, drawing attention to the interconnectedness of different natural orders of things. A two-dimensional representation of a sculptural installation by activist artist Dean Hutton, previously installed at Nirox Sculpture Park, it asks, “what if artworks can intervene and heal the environments in which they live?” The installation is a floating island that uses vegetation to remove pollutants from bodies of water and provide a new habitat for aquatic organisms.

Perhaps the most striking work on show is the most traditional in its form — a series of photographs by Adam Broomberg and collaborator Rafael Gonzalez. The pair have been photographing olive trees in the occupied territories in Palestine, where these trees, many of which are thousands of years old, keep alive thousands of Palestinian families.

The destruction of almost a million of the trees has been an unacknowledged casualty of the war with Israel in the region. The simplicity of the photographic series, of these ancient natural wonders in stark black-and-white, brings home forcefully the wholesale destruction of what should be our productive and symbiotic relationship with many different natural ecologies.

Imminent and Eminent Ecologies is on at Fada Gallery, UJ, until October 29.