Conversing with Leaves

2023.03.18 Saturday 19:00

Location

Online

Speaker: Uriel Orlow

Uriel Orlow will present recent projects which look at human-plant entanglements, with plants as active agents in history and politics. Trying to find new forms of representation across photography, film, installation and sound, Orlow's practice engages with decolonial and ecological questions and more than human witnessing. 

About the Speaker: Uriel Orlow

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.

Uriel Orlow 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, Taipeh, Sharjah, Moskau, Kathmandu, Guatemala and many others

His work has also been shown in exhibitions in London, Lisbon, Zurich, Geneva, Athens, Jerusalem, Ramallah, Marseille, Paris, Oslo, Dublin Turin, Cairo, Istanbul, Mexiko-Stadt, Peking, New York, Chicago, Toronto, Melbourne and elsewhere. Recent publications include Conversing with Leaves (Archive Books, 2020), Soil Affinities (Shelter Press, 2019) and Theatrum Botanicum (Sternberg Press, 2018). Uriel Orlow is a lecturer University of the Arts, Zurich (ZHdK) and at University of Westminster, London.

About the Project Curator: Yang Beichen

Dr. Yang Beichen is a researcher and a curator based in Beijing, China. He is the director of the MACA(Beijing), and one of the members of the Thought Council at the Fondazione Prada (Milan, Venice).

MACA Art Center is a non-profit contemporary art institution housed in a standalone building of minimalistic industrial style and futuristic design in Beijing's 798 Art District, a major hub for arts and culture in the city. Through forward-looking and experimental content, MACA aims to enable communication traversing disciplinary boundaries while forging international dialogues grounded in the specificities of a Chinese perspective. Our programmatic scope, which spans exhibitions, research initiatives, pan-performance practices, and alternative communal engagement, signals a commitment to exploring ideas outside established epistemic frameworks. MACA seeks to position itself as a new institutional mode, proposing an alternative coordinate within the topology of Chinese contemporary art. Through art, we address our radically transforming times.