As local weather change disasters have grow to be globally ubiquitous and the necessity for motion grows ever extra pressing, artists more and more use their work to attract consideration to ecological crises.
At Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong, a women-oriented perspective on this situation is dropped at the fore in Green Snake: women-centred ecologies. Bringing collectively greater than 30 artists and collectives, Green Snake presents over 60 artworks that draw from mythology and indigenous data to interact with ecological perils, pure relationships, and various prospects for the longer term.
Exhibition view: Green Snake: women-centred ecologies, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (20 December 2023–1 April 2024). Courtesy Tai Kwun. Photo: Kwan Sheung Chi.
The title is taken from an Eighth-century Chinese folktale about two demon sisters, White Snake and Green Snake. The latter, who’s often known as Xiaoqing, has come to be related to transformation, girls’s company, and loyalty.
The snake can be a metaphor for nature and its capacity to regenerate—attributed to the shedding of pores and skin—with its type echoing a river’s serpentine curves. Water, in truth, is an underpinning theme throughout this exhibition, with quite a few works drawing on river techniques and their related mythologies. This is maybe unsurprising—water, in any case, is a life-giving and life-sustaining drive.
Seba Calfuqueo, TRAY TRAY KO (2022). Video documentation of efficiency, filmed by Sebastián Melo. 6 min. Exhibition view: Green Snake: women-centred ecologies, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (20 December 2023–1 April 2024). Courtesy Tai Kwun. Photo: Kwan Sheung Chi.
In the primary exhibition area, 5 video works create a cacophony of sounds with the tinkling of glass, bird-like hoots, singing, and the sound of dashing water all vying for our consideration. We see the motion of rivers, swamps, and waterfalls projected throughout screens and partitions, together with in Chilean artist Seba Calfuqueo’s TRAY TRAY KO (2022), a charming large-scale video projection.
Over its six-minute length, the artist pulls a size of heavy blue material throughout the conservation space of Río Palguín in Chile. The cloth shimmers because it cuts via the luxurious, inexperienced panorama because the artist makes their approach to a waterfall, a sacred and therapeutic area for the Indigenous Mapuche. Here, Calfuqueo immerses themself and the material below the waterfall, round which develop medicinal therapeutic vegetation. Exploring the connection between politics, gender, water, and land, the work speaks to the dispossession of the Mapuche and queer folks in Chile below the army junta of Augusto Pinochet—who initiated the privatisation of pure assets, impacting Mapuche territories and water our bodies—and the persevering with battle to revive pure water techniques.
Adriana Bustos, Pejerreina (2023). Mud, video. 9 min. Exhibition view: Green Snake: women-centred ecologies, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (20 December 2023–1 April 2024). Courtesy Tai Kwun. Photo: Kwan Sheung Chi.
The historic bleeds into the up to date and ecological with Cecilia Vicuña’s video, Quipu Mapocho (2016–17), which paperwork a collection of performances alongside the Río Mapocho that flows via Santiago. For many years the river, which was described as a ‘useless river’, has been the positioning of sewage and industrial waste dumping, and flowed with the our bodies of victims below Pinochet’s rule.
In Quipu Mapocho, tendrils of unspun, red-dyed felt wool ‘quipoems’ (a contraction of poem and ‘quipu’, a pre-Colombian type of writing and record-keeping that consisted of vibrant knotted cords) float from a melting glacier all the way down to the banks of the Mapocho river, to the sound of mournful, haunting music and poetry. In Vicuña’s video, the river turns into the positioning of recollections the place the convergence of politics and indigenous techniques of information and mythology could be explored.
Jaffa Lam, Tin Hau is coming for a bit of water 2.0 (2023). Commissioned by Tai Kwun Contemporary. Exhibition view: Green Snake: women-centred ecologies, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (20 December 2023–1 April 2024). Courtesy Tai Kwun. Photo: Kwan Sheung Chi.
A considerably complicated conceptual segue leads viewers away from the ecological and into the domains of wellness and therapeutic. A collection of vibrant drawings and watercolours by two artists, Guo Fengyi and Ann Leda Shapiro, delve into acupuncture, qi gong, and bodily therapeutic, whereas close by, a glowing neon-purple hall homes a big, volcanic rock, suspended overhead in an online of stretched ropes and shibari-style knots. Hong Kong-based artist Jaffa Lam’s Tin Hau is coming for a bit of water 2.0 (2023), which references Tin Hau, a goddess of the ocean in southern China, responds to the impression of land reclamation and growth upon the shorelines of Hong Kong, and the following demolition of a number of Tin Hau temples.
Jaffa Lam, Tin Hau is coming for a bit of water 2.0 (2023). Commissioned by Tai Kwun Contemporary. Exhibition view: Green Snake: women-centred ecologies, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (20 December 2023–1 April 2024). Courtesy Tai Kwun. Photo: Kwan Sheung Chi.
The second adjoining exhibition area is an impediment of huge installations, with many works that target materials—geometric rows of soil, suspended planks of wooden, and quite a few textile works—and the histories and narratives embedded inside. Suspended behind concrete pillars is Carolina Caycedo’s A Cobra Grande (2019), a rainbow serpent product of fishing nets based mostly on a fabled large snake that inhabits the Amazon River basin. A collection of 5 detailed dyed-textile panels by Indian artist Lavanya Mani (Spore trails; Improbable planet; No man’s land; Herbarium 1 (from the Medicine Mountain); and Spectral objects (from the Book of Wonders), all 2018–19) discover the historical past and ecology of textile commerce in India, revealing interconnected histories via materials.
Back to entrance: Carolina Caycedo, A cobra grande (2019). Hand-dyed artisanal fishing web, lead weights, embroidered patches, and caxixi devices; Marzia Migliora, Paradoxes of lots #54, The snake ritual (2023). Drawings and collage on paper. 130 × 9140 cm. Co-commissioned by Tai Kwun Contemporary and Museum of Asian Art, Turin. Exhibition view: Green Snake: women-centred ecologies, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (20 December 2023–1 April 2024). Courtesy Tai Kwun. Photo: Kwan Sheung Chi.
Los Angeles-based artist Candice Lin’s wood construction, Kiss below the tail (2023), options indigo—a medication, dye, and colonial commodity—and invokes the exhibition’s titular delusion. Inspired by the set design of Tsui Hark’s movie Green Snake (1993), the set up options two round entrances over which an indigo noren (small curtain divider) is suspended, billowing gently within the breeze of a close-by fan. Within the construction we discover a tatami mat-covered ground, upon which glazed ceramic cat sculptures (which reference the ceramic pillows historically utilized in opium dens), and Tang dynasty zhenmushou (tomb guardians) collect round an indigo-dyed carpet.
Candice Lin, Kiss below the tail (2023). Mixed-media set up. Commissioned by Tai Kwun Contemporary. Exhibition view: Green Snake: women-centred ecologies, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (20 December 2023–1 April 2024). Courtesy Tai Kwun. Photo: Kwan Sheung Chi.
Illustrated on the carpet is a diagram representing the castration of a affected person of Doctor Coltman, an American medical missionary despatched to China in 1894 to check eunuchs, whereas a speculative dialogue with the artist’s castrated cat, Roger, performs within the background. The set up explores queer interpretations of the connection between the 2 snake sisters, whereas bringing collectively references to sexual practices, gender, and bestiality (on the coronary heart of the legend of White Snake is a love story between a shape-shifting snake and a human man).
Natasha Tontey, Of different tomorrows by no means identified (2023). Mixed-media set up. 15 min, 55 sec. Co-produced with the assist of Human Machine Fellowship of Akademie der Kunste (2021–23). Exhibition view: Green Snake: women-centred ecologies, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (20 December 2023–1 April 2024). Courtesy Tai Kwun. Photo: Kwan Sheung Chi.
No up to date group present is full with out works exploring the impression of know-how and synthetic intelligence on humanity. Green Snake ends with Natasha Tontey’s technicolour camp horror movie, Of different tomorrows by no means identified (2023), a dive into the deep time of ancestral Indigenous Minahasan tradition in northern Sulawesi Indonesia. Mythology intersects with know-how, because the movie brings collectively a double-headed serpent of Minahasan cosmology with synthetic intelligence. Similarly, Australian artist Tricky Walsh’s portray set up, The age of amnesia (2023), fuses science, philosophy, and speculative fiction in a psychedelic geometric set up that addresses the huge quantity of power required for our digital content material.
Green Snake is an formidable exhibition that packs in a list of topics that overwhelm and at instances obfuscate its exploration of ecofeminist considerations. While the connection between a feminist and declensionist environmental narrative could really feel inchoate, giving approach to occasional digressions of therapeutic modalities, a castrated cat, and synthetic intelligence, what we do get is a wealthy and engaging tapestry of mythology and indigenous and queer expertise, decoding the politics and historical past of exploitative economies and their position in environmental destruction. It is a meandering river of an exhibition that takes us in surprising instructions. —[O]
