The exhibition opens with work from Puerto-Rico based artist duo Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla who catalogued sites in Puerto Rico where palm trees were used as natural markers by the U.S. military during their sixty-year occupation of the island, to identify locations where hazardous waste had been disposed. These sites, which are now paradoxically managed as Conservation Zones, are photographed by Allora & Calzadilla and disrupted using screen-printing.
Born to Colombian parents, artist Carolina Caycedo looks towards Colombia, Mexico and Brazil, to document the effects of damming on surrounding communities and landscapes. Presenting archival images, maps, poems, satellite photos and researched texts, displayed in a meandering accordion fold style artist book, her Serpent River book tracks the power dynamics associated with the corporatisation and decimation of water resources, and the activism of displaced communities.
In a new work specially commissioned for the exhibition, Shiraz Bayjoo presents Dan Sa Karo Kann (in those cane fields), a work which deconstructs the material and visual languages of coloniality imposed on native populations in the Indian Ocean. Bringing together ceramic, sculpture and textile works, the installation considers the plantation as a site of extraction and seeks to restructure and re-dignify the archive of people and places affected by legacies of empire.
Franco-Algerian photographer and video artist Zineb Sedira presents two large-scale photographs, The Lovers (2009) and Sugar Routes I (2013) which documents the movement of sugar for mass consumption across the Atlantic from the Southern hemisphere reflecting on the history of human migration across oceans. Nigerian-born visual and performance artist Otobong Nkanga similarly reflects on the harvesting and transportation of the kola nut and its cultural significance in Nigeria, which flourished on the global market as an early ingredient in Coca-Cola but fell out of fashion due to its requirements of care.
Drawing further upon the themes of the movement, and the relationship between societal traditions and globalisation, Madagascar-born artist Malala Andrialavidrazana presents works from her ongoing series Figures. Her series of large-scale prints use identifiable signs, symbols and clichés of the recent past, from outdated atlases to bank notes and world stamps, questioning how inaccurate information, biased cultural norms and imagined hierarchies can be used to cement power and domination.
Artist duo Mazenett Quiroga explore the relationships between living organisms and how the ‘resources’ in their ecosystems, both mineral and biological, are appropriated and expanded across cultures, becoming integral to globalised economies and our daily lives. Drawing upon a fascination with the jaguar, present as a physical and spiritual animal in most native American cultures, the artists explored the animal’s habitat in the Colombian Amazon and the Lacandon jungle of Mexico, where mineral mining is threatening the environment.
Two video works complete the exhibition. Alberta Whittle’s from the forest to the concrete (to the forest) (2019) was developed during the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian in 2019, one of the most powerful cyclones to strike the Caribbean in modern times. Whittle interweaves performance with footage of the cyclone’s destruction, calling upon viewers to reflect upon their relative comfort living in the UK and elsewhere, in contrast to the destructive impact of the weather and societal inequalities affecting other parts of the world. Filmmaker Louis Henderson uses film to critique European colonial history in The Sea is History, presenting an adaption of Derek Walcott’s poem of the same name, overlayed with imagery filmed on Lago Enriquillo in the Dominican Republic, a hyper-salinated lake that continually floods the border with Haiti due to the drastic rise in sea temperatures affecting the global ocean.
