Are you an artist, curator or practitioner working on more than human relations? Is your practice concerned with ecological and social questions facing the world we live in? Join us for an intimate exchange with artist Uriel Orlow and curators Anushka Rajendran and Mira Hirtz as part of the Critical Zones exhibition (at Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi) which brings ecology, science and art into a close dialogue. In this workshop will discuss how such a dialogue manifests within a research-based approach to artistic practice and share different strategies and methods and engage with questions around the politics of representation.
Taking Uriel Orlow’s work as a starting point, we will open up the conversation and invite you to share your own practice and concerns.
NOTE: You will be required to share a single image which speaks to your practice or ideas, whether a finished project, research snippet or something in progress. The image will be shown during the workshop.
Image Credit: Bundesamt für Kultur, Florian Spring, 2023
Uriel Orlow is a Swiss-born artist with a diasporic background who lives between Lisbon, London and Zurich. He is the 2023 recipient of Swiss Grand Prix for Art / Prix Meret Oppenheim. His work has been presented at major international survey exhibitions including at the 54th Venice Biennale, Manifesta 9 and 12 in Genk and Palermo as well as at biennials in Berlin, Dakar, Kochi, Taipei, Sharjah, Moscow, Kathmandu, Guatemala and many others. Uriel Orlow’s practice is research-based, process-oriented and often in dialogue with other disciplines. Projects engage with residues of colonialism, spatial manifestations of memory, social and ecological justice, blind spots of representation and plants as political actors. His multi-media installations focus on specific locations, micro-histories and forms of haunting. Working across installation, photography, film, drawing and sound his works bring different image-regimes and narrative modes into correspondence. His work has been shown in exhibitions in London, Lisbon, Zurich, Geneva, St Gallen, Athens, Jerusalem, Ramallah, Madrid, Marseille, Paris, Oslo, Dublin Turin, Cairo, Istanbul, Mexiko-City, Bejing, New York, Chicago, Toronto, Melbourne and elsewhere and has been touring South Asia as part of the exhibition Critical Zones. Recent publications include Conversing with Leaves (Archive Books), Soil Affinities (Shelter Press) and Theatrum Botanicum (Sternberg Press). Uriel Orlow teaches at University of the Arts, Zurich (ZHdK) and at University of Westminster, London as well as at Maumaus, Lisbon.
Anushka Rajendran is the curator of Prameya Art Foundation (New Delhi) and also works independently as a curator and writer. Her ongoing curatorial research traces how the notion of public has acquired alternative significance to contemporary art in recent years, as well as the aesthetics of engagement within exhibition frameworks. This is informed by her previous research on responses by artists living in India in the 1990s to political and cultural trauma which has since expanded to encompass the South Asia region. She was the Festival Curator for Language is Migrant, the 2022 edition of Colomboscope, the only interdisciplinary arts festival in Sri Lanka and was on the curatorial team for Kochi Muziris Biennale 2018. Other recent projects include, Omer Wasim, Rites Adrift, Khoj Studios, 2023 (New Delhi); Yoshinori Niwa, Rehabilitating our human spirit under capitalism, Japan Foundation/Prameya Art Foundation, 2023 (New Delhi); Like Cupping Water with their Hands, PRAF at Focal Point, Sharjah Art Foundation, 2022 (Sharjah, UAE); Language is Migrant, Warehouse421, 2022 (Abu Dhabi); Phantasmapolis: Looking Back to the Future, Asian Art Biennial 2021-22, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, 2021 (Taiwan); And yet the air was still stirring, Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Madrid, 2021-22 (Spain); Anatomies of Tongues, Chobi Mela Shunno, 2021 (Dhaka); Speculations on a New World Order, Shrine Empire, 2020 (New Delhi); and Between the Lines, Aomori Contemporary Art Centre, 2019 (Japan). She has published essays in several publications including anthologies, academic journals and artists' monographs and is currently editing a monograph on Anoli Perera's life and work.
Mira Hirtz is an independent curator, performance artist and movement practitioner. She looks at the intersections of art, health, ecology and science. Her work dives into concepts of body, care as well as human and non-human interdependencies. It takes many formats, from exhibitions, and performances to painting and facilitating workshops.
Mira Hirtz graduated from the MFA Creative Practice at TL Conservatoire London and from the MA art research at University of Art and Design Karlsruhe. She co-curated the program series “How do we care?” at Badischer Kunstverein 2020. Currently, she is the access advisor for the arts-based charity Turf, London and co-curated the touring exhibition “Critical Zones. In Search of a Common Ground”, initiated by the ZKM | Karlsruhe, the Goethe-Institut South Asia, and Bruno Latour.
Details
Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan
3, Kasturba Gandhi Marg, Near Vakil Lane New Delhi 110001 India