Speaking Soil

Group Show

10.04.2024 - 02.06.2024
Opening: 10.04.2024, 6–9 pm

Tini Aliman, Wim Bosch, Cristiana Cott Negoescu, David Hahlbrock, Salomé Ingelbrecht, Zhixin Angus Liao, Darcy Neven, Nico Pachali, Silke Schatz, Rosa Vrij, Finn Wagner, Marit Westerhuis

 

The Philara Collection, in cooperation with BORDERLAND RESIDENCIES is pleased to present Speaking Soil, an extensive group exhibition. Twelve international artists from Belgium, China, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Romania, and Singapore, among others, examine aspects of soil as a resource, habitat, and territory, as well as related rhetoric around ownership, resettlement, migration, and climate change.

 

In 11 chapters, Speaking Soil takes a range of artistic approaches to explore various aspects of the soil and its relevance to all life forms. The impetus for this exploration was provided by 'Art and Soil’, a wide-ranging excursion programme, in which artists awarded residencies by the BORDERLAND RESIDENCIES network participated. They were invited to engage in artistic research on the ground in in the borderlands between Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. While visiting biodynamic agricultural enterprises near Kranenburg and Nijmegen, the artists, together with farmers and scientists, investigated new parameters, extending beyond economic factors or biochemical indicators, for determining the value of land. On other field trips, the participants visited the rim of the Garzweiler opencast brown coal mine and active and renaturalised areas at gravel extraction sites in the district of Wesel.

 

The works in the exhibition take an exemplary rather than exhaustive approach to address a wide variety of discourses surrounding the narratives of this rich resource. They show bogs and bog bodies as points of interconnection between past and future, investigate national borders from a migration point of view, or renegotiate human-nature hierarchies from an ecofeminist perspective. The artists thus create a multilayered approach to socio-political debate on territories, uprooting and resettlement, extending to the question of whether images themselves can be 'living soil' providing nutrients. There is a particular focus on linguistic expression. The multilingual spectrum of meaning in terms such as soil, Mutterboden(German for native soil), and țară mamă (Romanian for motherland) to (Cantonese, Mandarin and Japanese for earth or soil) opens up new reflective spaces shaped by the diversity of experience and international origins of the artists. Poetic, graphic and sound-performative explorations of soil create a polyglot space in which plants become active co-creators of sound installations.

 

On the way to a more sustainable future and a more respectful treatment of soil and earth, the artists also look for poetic ways to arouse and foster our curiosity for geopolitical issues, to confront the problems of both local and global environments, to ‘stay with the trouble’[1] without becoming powerless.

 

The exhibition brings together video works, photograms, photographs, drawings, sculptures, installations, sound, and poetry and is complemented by several performances, workshops, and performative dinners.

 

Exhibition curators: Julika Bosch, Hannah Niemeier

Curatorial assistant: Dana M. A. Bulic

Borderland Residencies project sponsor: Kulturraum Niederrhein e.V.; Maike Beier and Ingrid Misterek-Plagge

 

[1] Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 2016.

 

Borderland Residencies

BORDERLAND RESIDENCIES is a project of the Kulturraum Niederrhein e.V., implemented in conjunction with Odapark center for contemporary art, and with the collaboration of the residency hosts.

 

The SPEAKING SOIL exhibition and BORDERLAND RESIDENCIES are supported by the Ministry for Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia as part of the Regional Culture Programme NRW, the Mondriaan Fund of the Netherlands, and INTERREG Germany-Netherlands, (co)financed by the European Union.

 

www.kulturraum-niederrhein.de

www.borderland-residencies.eu

Instagram: @borderland_residencies

 

Wirtschaft Industrie Klimaschutz und Energie NRW

Supported by the Ministry for Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia

 

RGB

INTERREG

Mondrian Found

Wounds Healed, Tales Etched | দাগ

Sumi Anjuman | Solo show

17.05.2024 - 08.09.2024
Opening: 17.05.2024, 6–9 pm

As part of the programme of the düsseldorf photo+ Biennale for Visual and Sonic Media, the Philara Collection is presenting the first solo show in Germany by Sumi Anjuman (b. 1989, Bogura, Bangladesh). Anjuman’s works are often developed in a multi-voiced process of dialogue between the artist and the people whose story she tells. Anjuman sees her artistic practice as part of a non-violent protest against patriarchal, gender- and sexuality-based repression, which is also an element of a collaborative healing process ‘healing through creation’. The artist works with the medium of photography, which she expands with drawings, embroidery, and archival materials, often shown configured as installations.

The exhibition brings together two photographic series, which have been developed over several years of engagement with various individuals directly affected by the issues addressed. Somewhere Else Than Here is a series of portrait photographs of people in the LGBTQ+ community in Bangladesh, whose visibility both within and outside conservative Muslim society is extremely limited. Queer people in Bangladesh suffer from severe repression in both the social and legal spheres, in the latter case particularly stemming from laws dating from the era of British colonial rule. This means it is almost impossible for them to own their identities openly without having to live in constant fear of discrimination or violence. Taking her many conversations as a starting point, Anjuman’s series visualises imaginative formulations for hope, love, freedom, and security and confronts fear, isolation, and dehumanisation. Her photographs are augmented by items from a material archive of objects given to Anjuman by the people she portrayed, which bear witness to their experiences.

The second series, River Runs Violet, takes as its theme sexual violence and rape culture in patriarchal structures. Despite advances in equal rights, women in Bangladesh are particularly severely subjected to gender-based violence. Anjuman worked closely on this theme with Zana (pseudonym), a survivor of multiple sexual abuse and rape. In a process of dialogic exchange, a visual conversation that interweaves the perspectives and experiences of both participants was created. Various materials and techniques, including photography, found images, embroidery, text, and drawings are used to address the individual crime and, in particular, the broader socio-political background.

Sumi Anjuman lives and works in The Hague, the Netherlands, and Dhaka, Bangladesh. She is currently an artist in residence on the Encounters of Young International Photography programme at the Villa Pérochon, Niort, France. Last year, Anjuman completed the MA Photography & Society degree at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, Netherlands. Her works have been shown internationally, including at the Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2023), at Paris Photo (2022), and at the Noorderlicht International Photo Festival, The Netherlands (2021). In 2022, she won a Carte Blanche Students award at Paris Photo.

 

Exhibition curators: Julika Bosch, Hannah Niemeier

Curatorial assistant: Dana M. A. Bulic