Becoming Earths gathers speculative gestures of future feminisms embedded in reciprocal life with nature. The imaginative rewriting of new realities from feminist perspectives entangles common resources for the reproduction of life grounded in the potentialities with earth. With a constellation of artworks by Manjot Kaur (IN), Anouk Kruithof (NL) and Elisa Strinna (IT), the exhibition proposes embodied alternatives to the existing dualistic constructions of nature and culture.
Manjot Kaur’s (1989, India) work cross-pollinates ancient mythologies and precarious ecologies with fiction and speculation. Invoking relationality between birds and women, the artist postulates a queer ecology where species move towards an uncanny kind of becoming. Hailing from the rich tradition of Indian Miniature, the intimate paintings in gouache and watercolour on paper hybridise old narrations with new identities, conveying questions of relationality, reciprocity, and mutuality within natural, ancestral, and human worlds. As figures of a renewed cosmos, in a peaceful and floating atmosphere, Kaur’s drawings silently ask and address questions of fertility and procreation, kinship, and environmental urgencies. Fragile and vulnerable, the depicted species initiate the seeds for imagining other futures concerning life on our planet.
Anouk Kruithof (1981, NL) crystallises transformative processes on the surface of digital iconographies through encounters with the dense tropical forest habitat where the artist lives in Suriname. With her project Trans Human Nature, she explores the myth of a hybridised, polyphonic and harmonious nature along with the human fantasies of transformation for the self and for others. Kruithof, in her multimedia practice, reveals not only the spirit of current time but ‘the nerves of the times’, embracing the ceaseless entanglement that exists and permeates the living body and the modern infrastructures. Her artworks become a reservoir of the flow of images and their overwhelming abundance combined with the skin of ‘transhuman nature’.
Elisa Strinna’s (1982, Italy) porcelain sculptures explore the relation between plants and the human body. Her research is done in collaboration with an Italian herbalist, Karin Mecozzi, and American scholar Dr Nicole Trigg. Taking a close look at healers and witchery, while delving into the ideologies of modernity regarding notions of the feminine, the non-human, and the irrational. With her project My Body is a Plant – garden of banes, the artist refers to female reproductive power and women as the embodiment of ancestral knowledge. Her sculptures and watercolours emerge from a hybridization process between plant and human organs. No longer a miserable mechanistic ensemble, the body becomes a cosmic threshold to communicate with and toward other species, crossing and experimenting with symbiotic relations, and vegetating in unexplored physical and psychic states.