On the 12. September 2024, the group exhibition Orangery og care opens at the Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst. The group exhibition Orangery of Care is dedicated to the potted plant as a starting point for linking ecological, feminist and postcolonial issues. Around a site-specific spatial installation for the care and propagation of discarded houseplants, 13 works by contemporary artists negotiate the relationship between humans and plants in urban space.
Image above: Marlene Heidinger, Das Schicksal von Vösendorf, 2022. Courtesy of the artist
Houseplants are just as entangled in the colonial history of botanical gardens and the industrial destruction of habitats as they are in privatised life-support practices. The care of rubber trees, monsteras and yucca palms is part of supposedly apolitical housework. Rethinking the coexistence of humans with plants means questioning the fetishisation and exoticisation of plants and their role in the naturalisation of (post-)colonial conditions, while at the same time reflecting on the importance of regenerative and caring activities for the preservation of ecosystems.
The artist group PARA designed a greenhouse for the care and propagation of discarded houseplants. The work tells of houses and offices as spaces inhabited by plants, speculates on the virtual survival of plants and utilises the principle of friendship for plant propagation. The nGbK team developing the exhibition consists of PARA members. The curatorial concept of “Orangery of Care” is based on their spatial installation: in the group exhibition, video and spatial installations, sculptures, paintings and textile works negotiate various dimensions of the relationship between humans and plants. They show the tensions between protection and control inherent in plant cultivation and scrutinise its transformative potential.
Works by Anne Marie Maes & Margarita Maximova, Bethan Hughes, Marlene Heidinger, Hoda Tawakol and Sophie Utikal address the foundations of life and vitality, the limits of caring resources and constructions of nature and femininity. Films by Jesse McLean and Rob Crosse explore the different care needs of plants cohabiting with humans and mutual support systems, while Jana Kerima Stolzer and Lex Rütten question the technical manufacturability of artificial nature within idealised notions of biohacking. Samir Laghouati-Rashwan and Julia Löffler trace the after-effects of colonialism when humans make use of plants and capitalise on them; Laure Prouvost‘s video work, on the other hand, places itself tenderly at the service of the living beings around it. The works by Shirin Sabahi and Dunja Krcek thematise the ambivalence of the garden between utopia and dystopia and the relationship between humans and plants that arises when beauty is experienced at the sight of flowers.
The accompanying event and educational programme consists of various performances, lectures and spatial activations and also refers to the plant biodiversity of the surrounding urban landscape.
Exhibition with works by: Rob Crosse, Marlene Heidinger, Bethan Hughes, Dunja Krcek, Samir Laghouati-Rashwan, Julia Löffler, Anne Marie Maes & Margarita Maximova, Jesse McLean, PARA, Laure Prouvost, Lex Rütten & Jana Kerima Stolzer, Shirin Sabahi, Hoda Tawakol, Sophie Utikal
About the works and the artists
Laure Prouvost
Taking Care (Love Letter to Fellow Art Work)
What kind of ecosystem does an exhibition form? What practices keep it alive? What relationships do artworks have with each other and what would it mean to take care of each other among artists? Laure Prouvost’s video work raises these questions while caressingly placing itself at the service of the organisms surrounding it – in an exhibition these are usually other artworks, here they are tropical houseplants. According to studies, plants react to sound waves with increased growth. Whispering, the artist promises to always be there for them, to provide the best environment and the right temperature, to carry them even when no one is looking. She speaks to the plants, not to the exhibition audience. Her hands play a central role: they emphasise the touch, the tactile qualities of caring and make visible the relational space that unfolds between the voice and the creature being cared for.
Laure Prouvost was born in Lille, studied fine arts in London and currently lives in Brussels. She is known for her immersive multimedia installations and her humorous play with language as a means of imagination. She has shown her work in numerous solo exhibitions worldwide, including at ACCA Melbourne, Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Kunsthalle Wien, Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. In 2019, she represented France at the 58th Biennale Arte in Venice.
Julia Löffler
Exotic Plant Hunters
“Plantparents” or “Plantfluencers” stage themselves on social media amidst their collections of plants, which are intended to signal mindfulness and sustainable consumer behaviour. The “urban jungle” is part of a colonial tradition that brought tropical plants into the luxurious city flats of the 19th century bourgeoisie through exploitation and shipping. At this time, exoticised plants became an object of representation of wealth and prosperity. Using a photographic juxtaposition of historical and contemporary plant collectors, Julia Löffler emphasises their similarities on an aesthetic and narrative level. The visual codes, which have hardly changed over time, reveal the colonial legacy in everyday life. Then as now, it is possible to capitalise on window leaves and indoor palms.
Julia Löffler researches and visualises seemingly everyday things and uses them to develop a critical reflection on socio-political contexts. In addition to her freelance artistic projects, she works as a communication designer. The result of her photographic research Exotic Plant Hunters was published by Textem Verlag Hamburg in 2024.
Anne Marie Maes & Margarita Maximova
Swarmdust / Zwermstof
With Swarm Dust / Zwermstof, artist Anne Marie Maes creates an artificial environment as a stage for the unpredictable emergence of life. Semi-transparent skins, grown from colonies of bacteria and yeast, almost completely cover a reflective wall, hanging loosely over sandy gravel and pebbles. The eponymous “swarm dust” is scattered over this gravel: clusters of enlarged mint pollen visualise how complicated and detailed their structure is. The scene is complemented by screens rising from the gravel: Margarita Maximova’s video works pick up on the hypnotic and psychedelic properties of plants. A tea ceremony combines smoke, sound and flavour to create a live audio play and activates the space on the opening weekend.
The multidisciplinary artist Anne Marie Maes is trained in botany and visual anthropology. She combines art and science with a special interest in ecosystems and alchemical processes. On the roof of her studio in Brussels, she has set up a field laboratory to work with insects and bacteria and studies the moulding processes of nature. Maes has shown her work in solo and group exhibitions worldwide. Swarm Dust / Zwermstof is a new work that she has developed for the exhibition.
Margarita Maximova‘s artistic practice is audio-visually based. By engaging with contemporary image-making technologies, she explores the connections between memory entanglements, social relationships and the dynamics of communication in the digital age.
Hoda Tawakol
Lure #30
Delicious Monster #15
Hoda Tawakol‘s works are voluminous and utilise all the surrounding dimensions: They grow out of the wall, crawl across the floor and drop from the ceiling as if they were undergoing plant-like metamorphoses. The textile sculpture of the Monstera deliciosa, one of the most popular houseplants in Europe’s metropolises, towers above people. Just as the monstrous often symbolises the return of repressed experiences, the long blood-red roots that reach into the room and interrupt the visitor’s walk are a reminder of the violent history of uprooting that the tropical plant carries within itself. The soft and inviting texture of the plant contrasts with its threatening nature – it could also form a shelter. The play with contradictions in constructions of femininity and nature is also reflected in the work Lure #XX. Oscillating between giant lure, plant and body with feminine connotations, it questions power dynamics and gender-specific attributions in the ecological sphere. Its form and materiality are attractive, while at the same time it throws the viewer’s gaze back on themselves.
Hoda Tawakol‘s practice includes hand-sewn and hand-dyed textile works, works on paper, mixed-media sculptures and installations. With them, she refers to cross-cultural, social and patriarchal control mechanisms and deconstructs them. She fragments the feminine in order to simultaneously make it disappear, preserve it and repossess it. Born in London, the Egyptian-French artist lives and works in Hamburg. In 2023, the Dortmunder Kunstverein dedicated a solo exhibition to her; her works have also been shown at the Georg-Kolbe-Museum Berlin, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, among others.
Samir Laghouati-Rashwan
Quinquina Diaspora
Quinine is extracted from the bark of cinchona trees – known as an ingredient in tonic water, but used for centuries by indigenous communities as a medicinal plant against malaria and other diseases. In the video work Quinquina Diaspora, a silent conversation between the 3D replicas of two cinchonas is translated with subtitles. They question their botanical naming and other human assumptions about them, recalling their origins in Peru, their forced relocation to Europe and their mass introduction as a crop in colonised countries such as Cameroon. There, the Bamileke group, native to the grasslands, was entrusted with the cultivation of cinchona, whose cultivation methods differed from those of the colonisers. A genocide was committed against the Bamileke in the early 1960s. Laghouati-Rashwan’s work is dedicated to the legacy of the colonial history of violence and resistance that lives on in the plants.
Samir Laghouati-Rashwan uses film, photography and sculpture to explore the politics of space and the body. He traces marginalised or forgotten histories and examines geographical and linguistic evidence of systems of domination. His works have been shown at the CAC Brétigny and the Fondation Kadist in Paris, at the Sissy Club and other art spaces in Marseille as well as at the Rencontres de la Photo in Arles.
Dunja Krcek
Maintaining floral structures
Pumpkin Flower
Wonderous questions
Wild Growth
Algae
Dunja Krcek’s paintings allow us to experience what the naked human eye does not usually recognise: the movement patterns of plants, their dynamic forms and material qualities, which are constantly changing. She visualises the relational space between man and plant, which is opened up by the perception of beauty at the sight of a flower. In her work, colour becomes a means of exploration in an attempt to understand the expressions of plants. The images come from a series of paintings and tapestries by Krcek that are inspired by plant images from the late European Middle Ages, textile designs from the Wiener Werkstätten, the understanding of landscape in Chinese ink drawings and personal encounters with plants. Krcek focuses her attention on the omnipresence of plants in the urban context and the dignity of non-human living beings by bringing them into the picture as protagonists.
Dunja Krcek works with painting, textiles and site-specific installations. She is interested in the visual investigation of relationships between human and non-human beings and the concept of “felt sense”. With her holistic, process-oriented approach, she also develops workshops on the production and use of plant colours as well as community-building formats with the Dunjiva Collective, which use artistic means to raise awareness of the biodiversity of different landscapes. She lives in Vienna.
Marlene Heidinger
Das Schicksal von Vösendorf
In this self-portrait, the artist processes her personal doubts and fears about growing up in a world that increasingly demands responsibility and less self-centredness. As if in a snapshot, she captures a moment of failure in a banal everyday situation: While still at the checkout, the dragon tree crashes to the ground, soil scattering everywhere, under the eyes of curious and annoyed observers, while an employee has long since pulled out the dustpan and takes care of the situation. The reflection of public judgement, class society, gender roles and mass consumption that manifests itself in the situation merges in the background into a landscape of egg cells and the troubled inner life of the protagonist. Will she ever be able to look after a child if she can’t even keep this plant alive? Doesn’t the soil on the ground resemble a bloodstain at a crime scene?
Marlene Heidinger studied painting and animation film at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. In her work, she deals with relationships, social dynamics, scripted reality formats and the lack of privacy in social media. In her paintings and animated films, Heidinger tells stories based on brief moments of stillness and challenges the viewer’s imagination to allow the figures to continue their movements.
Shirin Sabahi
Cuttings
Muted Fanfare for the Shy
Shirin Sabahi’s “cuttings” are glass flowers that she has put together from bowls and other glass household items found at flea markets and online. Lined up on the wall like hunting trophies and casting colourful shadows of light, they enchant the eye. As lifeless copies, however, they simultaneously point to the transience and fetishisation of their living models – and to an imminent world of artificial, dead nature. The ambivalence of the human fascination with plants, in which affection, caring, desire and violence are equally intertwined, is also expressed in her video work. Muted Fanfare for the Shy shows a greenhouse in the Wilhelma zoological and botanical gardens in Stuttgart. The camera scans the glass and iron architecture from the outside, which is used for the European cultivation and presentation of plants from distant climate zones. The plants appear to be on the move and push against the boundaries of their simulated habitat from the inside, as if they are trying to get outside – a reference to the flipside of the culture of exhibiting and viewing.
Shirin Sabahi’s works deal with built space and the production, contextualisation and interpretation of artefacts and places over the course of time. Art and architectural legacies appear as representatives of larger historical, economic and urban developments. Her installations combine appropriated and newly produced photographic, filmic, sculptural and spatial materials. She lives in Berlin.
Bethan Hughes
Limits of Care
Bethan Hughes has been exploring the materiality and history of latex in various media for many years. In her commissioned work The Limits of Care developed for the exhibition, however, she focusses on a “rubber tree” that is not used for rubber production: Ficus elastica, which originally comes from north-east India and Indonesia and is grown en masse in Dutch greenhouses, is one of the most popular houseplants in colder climes, especially as it generally defies even the most negligent carers. However, with this rubber tree haunting the exhibition space as a plant spirit, the artist reflects on her own limited caring capacities. She erects a monument to the domesticated plants whose dependence on human care has been their undoing: they bear witness to humanity’s inability to take responsibility for the unnatural structures it has erected.
Bethan Hughes‘ audiovisual installations, sculptures and texts explore the unnatural ecologies created by industry, commerce and technology. Her most recent project in a series on natural rubber, Hevea Act 6: An Elastic Continuum, has been shown at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón and gnration, Braga and will be part of a solo exhibition by the artist at Kunstpavillon Innsbruck in autumn 2024. The artist is currently working on her first monograph (to be published in early 2025)
Sophie Utikal
From Within
Turning Inside Out
Protected
The three textile pictures are from Sophie Utikal’s series In Transitions: In autofictional works, the artist explores the physical transitions of pregnancy. As a triptych, the hand-sewn snapshots tell of the feeling of super-naturalness, of the dissolution and rediscovery of familiarity, of alienation, pain and security and of the change in one’s own neediness over time. Utikal’s symbolic imagery opens up a space for interpretation that viewers can fill with their own experiences and emotions and link to their own body knowledge. Explicit and implicit pictorial elements reminiscent of plants refer to the metamorphoses of bodily sensations and the connections to other living beings, while a new life grows within oneself.
Textile artist Sophie Utikal lives in Berlin and Vienna. She studied contextual painting with Ashley Hans Scheirl at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and is co-editor of the publication Anti-Colonial Fantasies/Decolonial Strategies (Zaglossus Verlag, 2017). Her works have been shown at Kristinstads Konsthal, Kunsthalle Wien and Mediterranea Biennale 19 in San Marino, among others; her most recent solo exhibitions took place at Galerie Ebensperger, Berlin and Kunstraum Innsbruck. Her works are part of the public collection of the Federal Republic of Germany and the private collection of the Museion in Bolzano.
Rob Crosse
Wood for the Trees
The science of determining the age of wood, dendrochronology, analyses the past of a tree and derives the necessary conditions for its future healthy growth. The film Wood for the Trees draws parallels between trees and people: It combines footage of scientists examining an old German forest stand with footage of residents of an LGBTQ+ multigenerational housing project in Berlin. Just as trees pass signals to each other underground and the forest ecosystem is characterised by mutual support, intergenerational exchange reveals opportunities for diverse and inclusive forms of family, care and community.
Visual artist and filmmaker Rob Crosse was a participant in the Berlin programme for artists 2019-2020 and was awarded the Ars Viva Prize in 2020. His recent exhibitions include Chaleur Humaine, Triennial Art + Industry, Dunkirk, Plant Fever, Kunstgewerbemuseum, Dresden and Ars Viva 2020, Kunstverein Hannover. His video works have been shown as part of Room in a Crowd, ICA, London Film Festival and Last Remnants of Nature, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
Jesse McLean
Light Needs
Having plants in the house seems to be a matter of course today. People share their homes and working environments with photosynthesising creatures – most of them tropical species that would not survive in their pots without human care. The experimental documentary film Light Needs examines the many ways in which domesticated plants and humans live together. It meets people who dedicate a large part of their time and their living and working spaces to caring for plants. The relationships with the plants are characterised in different ways, from duty to business, science and aesthetics to emotional dependence. The film also changes perspective: it speculates on the houseplants’ experiences, their observations and what it feels like to convert light into sugar. The film sensitively reflects on the relationships that humans have with non-human living beings and the responsibility that arises from caring for them.
Jesse McLean‘s art practice explores the question of what it means to be human in relation to the non-human. Her films have been presented in museums, galleries and film festivals worldwide, including CPH:DOX, Copenhagen, New York Film Festival, Venice Film Festival and mumok, Vienna. She is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres at the Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Jana Kerima Stolzer & Lex Ruetten
Symbiotechnica
Symbiotechnica, a cultivated creature as a hybrid of orchid and technology, tells of human fantasies of omnipotence and the belief in the technical feasibility of creating an artificial nature by means of geoengineering in the setting of a greenhouse. Greenhouses are themselves small biospheres, created from the idea of controlled environments, as architectures for the constant reproducibility of life. They symbolise both destruction and salvation through an artificial climate. Just as tropical plants are cultivated in glass constructions and defy the adverse European environmental conditions, people also dream of a social utopia in an artificial biosphere sealed off from the outside. The totally controlled environment as a shelter that ensures survival. Symbiotechnica asks about the next step: Can nature integrate technology, i.e. operate it itself?
Jana Kerima Stolzer and Lex Rütten have been working together as an artist duo since 2016. Their multimedia installations and performances deal with the technological environment that shapes and changes not only humans, but also flora and fauna. Their narratives combine historical and scientific research with science fiction to design the (im)possible for the future. In 2023, the duo opened their first institutional solo exhibition at Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund, and in 2024 they had a solo exhibition at Loop Alt Space, Seoul.
WHEN?
Opening: Wednesday, 11 September 2024, 6:00 pm
Exhibition dates: Thursday, 12 September 2024 to Tuesday, 17 September 2024
Opening hours: Tue-Sun 12-6 pm., Fri 12-8 pm.
WO?
Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK)
Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 11/13
10178 Berlin
