Corner College, 01 April - 6 May 2017

Opening on Saturday, 01 April, 16:30h

17:00h Discussion between Uriel Orlow and TJ Demos

You can find here and read an interview with Uriel Orlow by Dimitrina Sevova in the context of the exhibition (also printable as PDF 3.65MB)

Opening Hours / Öffnungszeiten
Wed/Fri 15:00h – 18:00h
Thu 16:00h – 19:00h
or by appointment (+41-79-792 77 44)
Additionally open on Saturday, 6 May, from 14:00h to 18:00h


[English below]

In seiner Ausstellung im Corner College betrachtet Uriel Orlow die botanische Welt als Bühne für Geschichte und Politik im Allgemeinen. Die gezeigten Arbeiten wurden in den letzten zwei Jahren entwickelt und befassen sich mit dem Vermächtnis der botanischen Forschungsexpeditionen, Pflanzenmigration, Blumendiplomatie und botanischem Nationalismus aus dem doppelten Blickwinkel Südafrikas und Europas.

Die in der Ausstellung gezeigten Arbeiten sind Teil von Uriel Orlows laufendem Rechercheprojekt Theatrum Botanicum. Das Projekt sieht Pflanzen nicht einzig als passive Objekte der Natur, des ästhetischen Genusses, der Klassifizierung, der Bewirtschaftung oder des Naturschutzes; sondern sowohl als Zeugen als auch als Akteure der Geschichte, als dynamische Agenten, die Natur und Menschen, Tradition und Modernität verbinden, und das über unterschiedliche Geographien, Geschichten und Wissenssystemen hinweg, mit heilenden, spirituellen und ökonomischen Kräften.


[Deutsch oben]

In his exhibition at Corner College Uriel Orlow looks to the botanical world as a stage of history and politics at large. The work in the exhibition was developed over the last two years and engages with the legacies of botanical exploration, plant migration, flower diplomacy and botanical nationalism from the dual vantage points of South Africa and Europe.

***

European colonialism in South Africa – as elsewhere – was both preceded and accompanied by expeditions that aimed at charting the territory and classifying its natural resources, in turn paving the way for occupation and exploitation. 'Newly' discovered plants were often named after the botanist who first described them and eventually classified according to the Linnaean system and its particular European rationality.


What Plants Were Called Before They Had a Name (2016-17) is an audio plant dictionary created from nine indigenous South African languages. Conceived as a surround sound installation, the work serves as an aural repository of local knowledge that was originally passed from generation to generation through oral tradition but was displaced by European writing and nomenclature, which it now confronts in the exhibition space.

Geraniums are never Red (2016-17) revisits the bright red geraniums that trail from the balconies of Swiss chalets and clamber up palm trees in California. Botanically speaking they aren’t geraniums at all–nor are they Swiss or Californian. They are in fact pelargoniums. They were first brought to Europe – and misidentified – after 1652, when the Dutch East India Company established a permanent settlement and a Company Garden at the Cape and started to explore the surrounding flora to bring back new botanical treasures, which apart from pelargoniums included proteas, ericas and many other mainstays of European gardens. By the time the confusion between the two species was resolved, ‘African geraniums’ had been around for 150 years and British commercial growers and gardeners were reluctant to give up the familiar name.

In 1963, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the founding of Kirstenbosch, the national botanical garden of South Africa in Cape Town a series of films were commissioned to document the jubilee celebrations and their ‘national’ dances, pantomimes revisiting the colonial conquest, the visit of international botanists and the history of the botanical garden itself. The films’ cast of botanists and visitors are mostly white and when we see Africans they are engaged in menial labour.

These films have not been seen since 1963 and were found by the artist in boxes in the cellar of the library of the botanical garden. The Fairest Heritage (2016-7) is an attempt to watch these documents today and speak back to the archive. Orlow collaborated with the actor Lindiwe Matshikiza who inhabits and confronts the found footage and its politics of representation, sending up the botanical nationalism and flower-diplomacy of apartheid era South Africa.

Exotics were the pride of European gardeners for a long time. But new species were not just brought to Europe to satisfy horticultural demand and other colonial economic interests. Some plants also arrived as stowaways; seeds in animal feed or other shipments. The consequences of newly introduced species were not always predictable and in recent decades botanists have highlighted the threat of some of these new-arrivals to local biodiversity. A number of national organisations deal with the problem of invasive neophytes producing information campaigns and so-called blacklists of exotics that are illegal and need to be eradicated. The management of ‘invasive aliens’ and the language accompanying it produces new forms of botanical nationalism that inadvertently mirror public discourse on human migration. The series of posters Blacklisted (Was wir durch die Blume sagen) re-mixes information gathered from the Zurich office for the control of neophytes and uses quotes from literature and websites across Switzerland.

***

The work in this exhibition is part of Uriel Orlow's ongoing research entitled Theatrum Botanicum. The project considers plants not solely as passive objects of nature, aesthetic pleasure, classification, cultivation or conservation; but as both witnesses and actors in history and as dynamic agents linking nature and humans, tradition and modernity– across different geographies, histories and systems of knowledge, with curative, spiritual and economic powers.


Mit der freundlichen Unterstützung der Stiftung Erna und Curt Burgauer, der Georges und Jenny Bloch Stiftung, und der Ernst Göhner Stiftung.

Buchvernissage
Christoph Kappeler
Josef Maria Schröder

Edition Patrick Frey

Mit Texten von
Christoph Kappeler, Ulrich Kinder, Michael T. Ricker
Gestaltung
Hi, Megi Zumstein, Claudio Barandun
Gebunden, 152 Seiten, 153 Farbabbildungen
17 × 24 cm
ISBN Nummer: 978-3-906803-37-1
Sprache: Englisch

Einzelheiten zum Buch siehe bei Edition Patrick Frey.

[English below]

PRESENT PROGRESSIVE

Corner College, Zürich
Kuratiert von peekaboo! (Lisa Biedlingmaier & Bernadette Wolbring)

Teilnehmende KünstlerInnen: Abel Auer (DE), Lisa Biedlingmaier (CH / DE), June Crespo (ES / NL), Ulrika Jäger (DE), Bernadette Wolbring (DE / SE)

Eröffnung Samstag, 13. Mai 2017, 19:00h
Finissage Samstag, 10. Juni 2017, 17:00h

Zusätzliche Veranstaltungen siehe unten.

Samstag, 13. Mai - Samstag, 10. Juni 2017

Öffnungszeiten
Mi: 15:00h - 18:00h
Do/Fr: 17:00h - 19:00h

Present Progressive; Zeitform, Englisch

Das Present Progressive ist eine Verlaufsform der Gegenwart. Dieses Tempus kann sich sowohl auf die Gegenwart als auch auf die Zukunft beziehen: Zum einen wird das Present Progressive für Handlungen, die jetzt gerade stattfinden, verwendet, zum anderen für sich ändernde Situationen und bereits vereinbarte Handlungen in der Zukunft. Dabei kommen vor allem Verben zum Einsatz, die einen Plan oder eine Bewegung von einem Ort oder einer Bedingung zur anderen vermitteln. Das Present Progressive ist eine Zeitform, die es im Deutschen nicht gibt.

peekaboo! präsentiert die Arbeiten von fünf KünstlerInnen, die sich mit Vorstellungen von Zeit und dem Ineinandergreifen von Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft beschäftigen. Recalling, reenacting und rewriting zum Beispiel sind Strategien, die wiederholt eingesetzt werden, um das Gewicht der Geschichte zu verlagern. Die Zeitreise wird als eine Möglichkeit vorgestellt, die Zukunft zu gestalten. Angeregt durch Chris Kraus´ „naive Vorstellung, dass es möglich ist dem Unglücklichsein zu entkommen, indem man einfach den Kanal wechselt“, hebt die Ausstellung Present Progressive die Gleichzeitigkeit von Ereignissen hervor – sei es in Vergangenheit, Gegenwart oder Zukunft.

Das Ausstellungsdesign besteht aus einem genau 68,38 m langen Gewebestreifen, der in Erinnerung ruft, dass es auch andere Vorstellungen von Zeit und zeitlichen Zusammenhängen gibt. Die Maße und die Materialität des Streifens beziehen sich nämlich auf den Teppich von Bayeux (entstanden im 11. Jh., 0,53m × 68,38m). Der Mediävist Peter Czerwinski stellt die These auf, dass im Mittelalter ein anderer Zeitbegriff existiert habe, der im Gegensatz zur heutigen Wahrnehmung der Zeit von einer Simultanität ausgehe (in Gegenwärtigkeit: Simultane Räume und zyklische Zeiten, Formen von Regeneration und Genealogie im Mittelalter, 1993). Kausal zusammenhängende Ereignisse, die in unterschiedlichen Zeitebenen stattfanden, wurden – laut Czerwinski – als gleichzeitig gedacht. Vergangenheit und Gegenwart sind in dieser Zeitvorstellung mithin nicht klar unterscheidbar. Darum werden auch auf dem Teppich von Bayeux Ereignisse, die nicht zeitgleich stattfanden, im selben Raum dargestellt, der lediglich durch Architekturelemente unterteilt wird.




[Deutsch oben]

PRESENT PROGRESSIVE

Corner College, Zurich
curated by peekaboo! (Lisa Biedlingmaier & Bernadette Wolbring)

Participating artists:
Abel Auer (DE), Lisa Biedlingmaier (CH/DE), June Crespo (ES/NL), Ulrika Jäger (DE), Bernadette Wolbring (DE/SE)

Opening Saturday, 13 May 2017, 19:00h
Finissage Saturday, 10 June 2017, 17:00h

Additional events see below.

Saturday, 13 May - Saturday, 10 June 2017

Opening hours
Mi: 15:00h - 18:00h
Do/Fr: 17:00h - 19:00h

­Present Progressive, tense, English

This tense is used to suggest either the present or the future. It can indicate that an action is going to happen in the future, especially with verbs that convey the idea of a plan or a movement from one place or condition to another.


peekaboo! presents the work of five artists that are dealing with perceptions of time and how past, present and future are interconnected. Strategies of recalling, reenacting and rewriting are applied in order to shift the weight of history. Travelling in time is presented as a way of shaping the future. Encouraged by Chris Kraus’s “naive recognition that it might be possible to escape from unhappiness just by changing the channel,” the show highlights the simultaneity of events – be it in the past, present or future.

The exhibition design consists of a 68.38m long strip of fabric running through the space to evoke a different idea of how time can be perceived. The strip’s measurements and materiality refer to the Bayeux Tapestry (0.53m × 68.38m). The German medievalist Peter Czerwinski claims that in the Middle Ages a different notion of time existed (in Gegenwärtigkeit: Simultane Räume und zyklische Zeiten, Formen von Regeneration und Genealogie im Mittelalter, 1993). In contrast to today’s chronological perception of time, the tapestry – like other medieval works of art – depicts a notion of time that assumes simultaneity. Here past and present are not clearly distinguishable – therefore causally related events are depicted in the same space, separated merely by elements of architecture.

Additional Events

Listening Sessions: RSI 92.3 FM Douala, Cameroon or any other proposals

Friday, 19 May, 5-6 pm
Thursday, 25 May, 5-7 pm
Friday, 26 May, 5-7 pm

“emotion reigns, information governs” is a thematic radio station dedicated to sports, music, and culture.

RSI is an avant-garde radio station featuring sports and cultural content. Created four years ago by Martin Camus Mimb, a renowned sports reporter on the African continent, the station is today the most listened-to radio in Douala, the economic capital of Cameroon. In the unique field of sports, we aim to give listeners a new vision of information, thanks to an experienced team of specialized reporters.

with Lisa Biedlingmaier

Who likes Chicken Curry? Who laughs about blackfacing and Mohamed caricature? Who defines arranged marriages? Who is scared of Indian IT-Workers? Who is involved in colonialism? Who survives? Who votes? Who really cares?

In this talk anthropologist and sociologist Rohit Jain inquires into the making of postcolonial public spaces of Switzerland in the age of de-centralised capitalism.

Informed by ethnographic and artistic research as well as from activist interventions Rohit delves into the unruly archives of forgotten stories, displaced feelings and interrogates the hegemonic machinery of making things und humans un/happen.

Starting from the transformative notion of „structure of feelings“ (Raymond Williams), the talk unravels the affective nature of postcolonial amnesia in Switzerland. On the hand, the resistance against postcolonial amnesia provokes melancholia, anxieties, or anger. On the other hand, to imagine alternative histories and stories allows to affect unruly archives and to unleash a performative power of assembly (Judith Butler).

Rohit Jain is, thus, interested in the conditions of possibilities as well as in the artistic, political and theoretical strategies to develop alternative publics of conviviality and new communities. The presented work, therefore, opens up new avenue for understanding an unacknowledged Swiss history of violence and envisioning a future of reparative justice at the intersection of ethnography, artistic practices and activism.

Rohit Jain is an anthropologist and anti-racism activist based at Zurich and Berne. His current work focuses on the connections between postcolonial archives, the politics of affects and the performative intervention into translocal publics. Rohit has done research and published on the entanglements of racism, humor and anti-PC in TV comedy, on transnational politics of representation among “second generations Indians” as well as on the connection between the Swiss public discourse of Bollywood, yoga and IT and postcolonial anxieties. Recently he has collaborated in artistic research projects on the “An/aesthetics of Suburbia” and on “Swiss Psychotropic Gold” (both at IFCAR Zurich) and on urban citizenship (at Shedhalle Zurich). He is co-founder of “Laugh Up. Stand Up! Antiracist Humor Festival” and of “Salon Bastarde”, a series of postmigrant happenings in Zurich.

The is a guest lecture of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating, ZHdK.