Dana Awartani

In her latest work, Dana Awartani meditates on themes of sustainability and cultural destruction. The work is composed of naturally dyed silk fabrics, handmade in Kerala, which have been stretched onto frames and displayed in a serial manner along the gallery’s walls. The fabrics are saturated with a multitude of natural herbs and spices that have specific medicinal functions in South Asian and Arab cultures. Awartani’s material choices speak to the work’s ethical and ecological terms of production, and further embody acts of resistance against mental and technological colonial violence given the dual emphasis on artisanal production and indigenous medicinal knowledges.

Awartani also creates tears and holes in the textiles, which correspond to the silhouettes of physical violence enacted on buildings in Arab nations at the hands of Islamic fundamentalists. Sourced from the Antiquities Coalition (an organisation that catalogues and protects these vulnerable heritage sites), the accompanying texts for each panel list the exact location and time of these traumatic events, as well as the cause and the group claiming responsibility. Mending these punctures through a process of darning (tracing holes or rubble with thread), Awartani’s work metaphorises possibilities of collective healing while recalling a venerable tradition of repairing and revering objects.

Dana Awartani engages in critical and contemporary reinterpretations of the forms, techniques, concepts and spatial constructs that shape Arab culture. Steeped in a multitude of historical references, especially Islamic and Middle Eastern art-making traditions, Awartani’s practice straddles continuity and innovation, aesthetic experimentation and social relevance. Spanning painting, sculpture, performance and installations, Awartani’s commitment to historically situated and locally sourced materials lends a rare sensitivity to urgent political concerns of gender, healing, cultural destruction and sustainability. Consistent throughout the artist’s work has been her philosophical elaboration of geometric patterns as an alternative genealogy of abstraction.

Born in 1945 in UK

Lives and works between London and Bristol UK

Richard Long’s site-specific wall work continues a series of temporary murals in paint, clay and mud that date back to other previous large-scale examples, such as Red Earth Circle, made for the ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 1989. Long manipulates the viscosity of this earthy, primal and colourful material against a backdrop or surface. Leaving behind gestural indexes of his explorative strokes, Long explores the interaction of multiple, conflicting natural and man-made forces.

He has made numerous other works referencing the colour red, including Red Walk (1986), which features a body of typographic text that documents a walk Long took from his home to Cornwall, picking out punctuations of red from a ‘Gypsies’ Fire’ to a ‘Cock Pheasant’s Face’. Another work from the same year, Red Slate Line, which was on long-term view at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, as well as the Guggenheim Museum’s earlier piece, Red Slate Circle (1980), were both made from a deep-red slate found at the border of Vermont and New York State. Long often employs mud from the River Avon, sourced from what he calls his ‘home’ river, which runs through Bristol, although he has, on occasion, also employed terracotta slip or a rich red clay from the region of Vallauris, the French capital of pottery and ceramic arts. He refers to the tactility and material simplicity of tidal and river mud, as well as its geological significance, having been created by the movement of water over millions of years. He sees it as: “a mixture of time, water and stone”.

Richard Long has been in the vanguard of conceptual art in Britain since he created A Line Made by Walking over half a century ago in 1967, while still a student. Through this medium of walking, time, space and distance became new subjects for his art. He expanded his walks to wilderness regions all over the world and began making new types of mud works using handprints applied directly to the wall. He also continued to make large sculptures of lines and circles from slate, driftwood, footprints or stone, often sourced from quarries near the exhibition sites. His walks and temporary works of passage are recorded through photographs, maps and text works, where measurements of time and distance, place names and phenomena are vocabulary for both original ideas and powerful, condensed narratives.

Born in 1992 in China

Lives and works between New York, USA and London, UK

Feifei Zhou

Flowing Toxins elucidates how infrastructures arrange water supply, sewage, and property into shifting relationships that variably reproduce structures of urban inequality in Jakarta, Indonesia. Across various scales, perspectives and dimensionalities, the drawing displays multiple narratives and material processes at once. The main map on the left-hand side of the drawing depicts Jakarta, where rapid land subsidence is occurring as wealthier strata of society and industry use private borewells to drill for deep groundwater – a cleaner and more reliable alternative to polluted, piped surface water. Meanwhile, industry returns severely contaminated wastewater back to Jakarta’s complex water channels, rivers and sea (the toxicity in water is highlighted in neon green). The apartment buildings, factories, and plantations represent three key sources of water pollution, which are domestic sewage, industrial effluent and agricultural runoff.

Poor coastal kampung (urban villages) like Muara Angke, as mapped on the right side, are informal settlements for traditional fisherpersons. The pressures that burden the kampung, namely polluted water, informal land tenure and lack of access to water and sanitation infrastructure, are the same sets of interrelated pressures that generate anthropogenic subsidence. Subsidence, in turn, gives rise to coastal infrastructure (such as seawalls, depicted at the bottom of the drawing) and property-making schemes that threaten to displace informal settlements. The top of the drawing illustrates cultivation of pollution-hardy green mussels as informal labour, ecotoxicological concerns about bioaccumulation in mussels, and how coastal people use mussel shell berms and semi-permanent architectures to adjust to subsidence, eviction and encroaching infrastructures. There are many entry points to reading the drawing, showing the simultaneity and multiplicity of the ecologies through which the material landscape and structural inequality co-shape one another. (Written by Feifei Zhou and Kirsten Keller)

Feifei Zhou is a Chinese artist and architect exploring spatial, cultural and ecological implications of human built infrastructure. Zhou is the co-editor and curator of Feral Atlas : The More-thanHuman Anthropocene, a collective work of more than a hundred scientists, humanists and artists, united in examining the non-designed effects of human infrastructures. In researching and studying how the natural world is impacted by the Anthropocene, she presents visual representations of often unpredictable solutions to perpetual environmental concerns.

Born in 1974 in Nigeria

Lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium