Landscape, disrupted

Concordia asked Şirin Bahar Demirel to act as guest curator for a new project, a group exhibition based on video installations that are thematically linked by challenging established norms and thus making way for new interpretations of the world around us.

The exhibition concept is based on the idea of actively revising, resisting, and rewriting stories. In this context, artworks themselves function as a political act, reclaiming power over representation by disrupting dominant forms of knowledge and art production. Through the cracks they create and open up, they give space to grief, anger, solidarity, and resilience.

Şirin: "The theme is relevant to the current context because we are experiencing a climate catastrophe, multiple genocides are unfolding before our eyes, the rights of women and transgender people are under pressure, fascist and anti-immigrant leaders are joining forces with tech giants, and so on. While I am living in this nightmare, it only makes sense to show artworks that, even if subtle in form, deal with these issues."

Like the rebellious spirits and wild plants that appear in their works, the artists refuse to submit to the patriarchal and colonial structures that shape our world today: Landscape, Disrupted.

Concordia and Şirin use the term ‘disrupted’ in the sense of breaking down or separating an object or idea from its original context in order to give its components a new purpose or to reconsider its meaning in a new context. The project aims to be an exploration of deconstruction and reassembly, of challenging established norms, power structures, and ways of thinking, and of creating new possibilities and interpretations. In the artists' works, both mental and physical landscapes are called into question.

The Artists
Five artists have been selected whose work is clearly connected thematically.

Lo Yuen Ming & Chun-Yao Lin
The artistic practice of this occasional duo constructs alternative narratives that arise from everyday political life, with a decolonial and feminist perspective. Working with minimalist imagery and archives of social movements, their long-term research interweaves abstract art with recent political oppression.

In Archiving The Scene, they explore how art can function as a witness to political oppression. The video series, inspired by painting tutorials, reflects on the painting over of protest slogans during the Hong Kong protests (2019–2020) as an act of erasure. By reproducing and reconstructing archives, the work questions the role of images in prolonging activism and invites viewers to reconsider the relationship between photography, history, and everyday political life.

Broersen and Lukács
Broersen & Lukács explore the complex relationship between culture and nature in their work. Their fascination with media, music, and technology forms the basis for a multidisciplinary practice in which these elements are interwoven with the politics of representation and appropriation of nature. In doing so, they draw on a wide range of mythological, art historical, scientific, and cinematic sources. Their oeuvre, which consists of films, installations, and performances, unravels and reinterprets the mythologies and origins of both real and fictional landscapes. 

In I Wan'na Be Like You, Broersen & Lukács explore the colonial image of “the jungle” as empty land. Botanical gardens in European cities are transformed into a virtual jungle using digital techniques. A hybrid avatar dances to a reinterpretation of Disney's The Jungle Book, after which Black Harmony takes over with the polyphonic song Na Mi. The work deconstructs and reconstructs colonial heritage, music, and memory in a layered visual performance.

Alaa Abu Asad
Asad is an artist, researcher, and photographer whose work takes the form of text, images, and installations. Language and plants are central themes with which he develops alternative trajectories in which values such as (re)presentation, translation, viewing, reading, and understanding come together.

The exhibition features his work Wild Plants of Palestine: Wild Plants of Palestine follows observation trips commissioned by the Palestinian Museum and carried out by two professors from Birzeit University to collect photographs and information about Palestinian flora. The title is taken from the Matson Collection, with images (circa 1900-1920) of wild flowers in Palestine, in the Library of Congress. Despite the tendency to trace wild plants, the text generally aims to question the territorial scope of the term ‘Palestinian’, while focusing on insignificant topographical features of the (postcolonial) landscape of the West Bank. Furthermore, the video treats photography as a practice and instrument for simultaneously disseminating and restricting information.

amy pickles
pickles is an artist and organizer. Her earlier work focused on colonial infrastructures and their influence on communication technologies. Later, her focus shifted to the Cold War, where her fascination grew into an investigation of the geopolitical meta-narratives of that period and their impact on our contemporary reality. Elements of the Cold War that continue to preoccupy her include: the artist as ideological messenger, the concept of ‘democracy’ and espionage, electronic battlefields, and the use of neuroscience and behavioral psychology in business management.

Alternative Echelons is a research and performance project that questions colonial occupation and capitalist data use. During an action at the Google data center in Eemshaven, the COBRAcable, an undersea internet cable, was searched for. The project re-choreographs Cecilia Vicuña's Cloud Net and explores objects by Lygia Clark. A similar action took place earlier at a British military base in Cyprus, part of the Five Eyes network—a symbol of digital imperialism and global surveillance.

Şirin Bahar Demirel
Demirel is a filmmaker and visual artist who works with moving image, collage, and installation. Her work focuses on the interplay between presence and absence by interweaving political and personal narratives. She explores home, the workings of memory, and the nuclear family as a microcosm of the patriarchal social structure.

In the exhibition, we show her work ‘Between Delicate and Violent’, an experimental documentary in which hands are considered as memory places that can build and transfer memories. Through hands and their creations, the film depicts the unearthing of lost memories that are not included in performative, socially accepted family albums. Can we see the violence of the painter's hands in the brushstrokes of his paintings? Could cross-stitch be a kind of alphabet? The video connects through imagination and creation with the director's personal past, while at the same time opening up larger human stories such as domestic violence and intergenerational trauma and resistance.

*Due to a Panel Talk in collaboration with Sustainable Fashion Week, the exhibition will be less accessible on October 8 from 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.