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, Hybrid Being 1, part of a diptych with Utka and The White Bellied Heron, 2022 | Gouache and watercolour on paper | 37,5 x 50,4 cm | Unique
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, People are the greenest creatures, 2021 | Pigment print on archival matt paper | 90 x 120 cm | Edition of 4 + 2 AP
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’.
The Garden of Banes; Belladonna, 2023 | Sculpture | Porcelain painted with majolica technique | 43 x 16 cm | Unique
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.
BIO Manjot Kaur
Manjot Kaur’s (1989, India) drawings, paintings, and time-based media attempt to decolonize the sovereignty of ecology and women’s bodies. She completed an artist in residence at Jan van Eyck Academie (NL, 2021), and a number of residencies in India, Italy and Switzerland. In 2023 Manjot will be a Visiting Artist Fellow at Harvard University in the USA. In 2022, she received a grant from Experimenter Gallery in India. Past exhibitions include a.o. India Art Fair (IN), Apre Art House, (IN), A Tale of A Tub (NL), AAIE Center for Contemporary Art (IT), Nature Morte (IN), Tensta Konsthall (SE), Surrey Art Gallery (CA), Bikaner House (IN), Garage Rotterdam (NL), Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum (IN), Museo Casa Masaccio Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea (IT). Her work is in the collections at a.o. Museo Casa Masaccio Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea (IT), Government Museum and Art Gallery, Chandigarh (IT), National Academy of Art in New Delhi (IT), State Academy of Art in Chandigarh (IN), Tellusart (SE) and a growing number of private collection in India, Sweden, Netherlands, USA and Austria.
BIO Anouk Kruithof
Anouk Kruithof’s (1981, NL) multilayered approach encompasses photography, sculpture, installation, photo-montage, text, performance, video and interventions in the public space. Kruithof lives and works between Belgium, The Netherlands, and the Amazon rainforest in Surinam. Her work is an investigation into the online representation of urgent societal themes, like government surveillance, pollution or climate change. Past exhibitions include a.o. MoMA (US), the ICP (US), the Stedelijk Museum (NL), FOAM (NL), the Netherlands Photo Museum (NL), the MBAL (CH), the Xiangning Art Museum (CN), the Center for Photography at Woodstock (US), Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin (DE), Museum Tinguely (CH), the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow (RU), Erarta Museum (RU), Daegu Arts Center (KOR), Museum De Domijnen (NL), MAMAC (BE), Manifesta (FR), Marca Museum (IT). Kruithof received public prize Volkskrant Beeldende Kunstprijs (2016), the Meijburg Art Commission (2015), the Charlotte Köhler Prize in the Netherlands (2014), the Infinity Award of the International Center for Photography in New York (2012), and the Jury Grand Prize of Festival International de Mode et de Photographie in Hyères (2011). Her work is in the collections at a.o. FOAM, the Stedelijk Museum, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Aperture Foundation, Museum Het Domein Sittard. Kruithof’s artist books are part of the public collections of the New York Museum of Modern Art Library, the ICP Library, the New York Public Library, Pier 24 Library, the MBAL, and the library of the Stedelijk Museum.
BIO Elisa Strinna
Elisa Strinna (1982, Italy) is a multimedia artist who works with sculpture, video, sound, and performance. Her work investigates the interconnection between humanity, nature, and technology, developing a critique of the Anthropocene era. Strinna’s work has been exhibited at a.o. documenta fifteen (DE), RADIUS CCA (NL), A Tale of a Tub (NL), OnCurating Project Space (CH), Culturgest Porto (PT), MAXXI museum (IT), Hong-gah Museum (TW), Giardini Greenhouse of the Venice Biennale (IT), MART Museum (IT), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (IT), Taipei Biennal 2012 (TW) amogst others. Strinna completed an artist in residence at Jan van Eyck Academie (NL, 2018) and won a number of grants and awards in the Netherlands, Italy, France, China and Spain. Her work is included in a growing number of collections, including Patricia Wolf (female artist contemporary) collection, Maria Tereza Alves and Jimmie Durham collection, Famiglia Forin collection.