Nina E. Schönefeld’s (Germany) video Dark Waters takes place in another poison sea. Set in a dystopian future where the oceans are poisoned with plastic and only jellyfish can survive in their waters, this film sadly bears more resemblance to truth than science fiction. Shingo Yoshida’s (Japan) video Réprouvé is striking for its very absence of water; turning a garbage strewn wasteland in Chile into a beautiful sound installation, it is nevertheless a frightening glimpse of what our planet may soon look like if we do not take better care of it, and if we do not curb overproduction of waste. Nezaket Ekici’s Water To Water, the documentation of her performance at Berlin’s Haus Am Waldsee museum, poses a beautifully impractical solution to a future of impending water shortages. Over the course of several laborious hours she manually filters five pitchers of lake water, drunk with varying degrees of reluctance by her audience.

These video works in our program for Food Art Week may be only tangentially about food, and yet each work illustrates in its own way the vast diversity in which water impacts upon the cycle of life on our planet. From the desertification of climate change to the predicted floods of melting glaciers, water is as deadly in its scarcity as it is in excess. And yet, life cannot exist without it. WATER(PROOF) is about such paradoxes. In our utter dependence on water, we nevertheless contrive to poison and squander it. Nothing is waterproof, in the sense of being impervious to water, when water is perceived as integral to most every industry which sustains our lifestyles and quality of life. Yet our lifestyles are poisoning our planet. WATER(PROOF) assembles the positions and experiences of eight international artists, each proving, in their own way, the precarious paradoxes of the cycles of water consumption and production, integrally linked to what we eat and how we eat it.

Stefano Cagol

Evoke Provoke [the border]
2011, HD video, 12’30”

The impact which mankind has upon the natural environment is at the root of this work created at Kirkenes, in the Norwegian Arctic Circle, during one of the periods Cagol spent abroad as an artist-in-residence. Cagol staged a series of emblematic actions that he filmed with a video camera, in total solitude, immersed in a fascinating but hostile natural environment, in extreme climactic conditions. The setting seems to be cloaked in twilight, barely dispelling the darkness, and the temperature is 25 degrees below zero. In those frozen lands, Cagol tries to communicate in one way or another, using different forms of signaling. He endeavours to modify the landscape, to light it up, to melt the snow with a flame, but every attempt at interaction with this harsh environment is in vain. The irony here is not lost. While one man cannot make a visible impact upon this frozen landscape, the impact of mankind as a whole is all too devastating. For Cagol in this case the border is precisely the one between himself, his body and his mind, the extreme nature that surrounds him, and the impact which mankind has upon this natural environment. Evoke Provoke (The Border) was shown at the solo exhibition Concilio in the church of San Gallo, as a collateral event at the 54th Venice Biennale, and is held in the MOMENTUM Collection.

Stefano Cagol – BIO

Stefano Cagol (b. 1969 in Trento, Italy) received a post-doctoral fellowship at the Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, after having graduated from the Accademia di Brera in Milan. He participated in Manifesta 11 and Manifesta 7; at the 55th Venice Biennale, invited by the Maldives Pavilion; at the 54th Venice Biennale with a solo collateral event; and at the 1st Singapore Biennale. In 2017 a still from Evoke Provoke [the border] becomes part of the Collection of the German Ministry of Environment (Sammlung Bundesministerium für Umwelt, Deutschland), and he is part of the grand inaugural exhibition curated by Veit Loers at Haus Mödrath – Räume für Kunst in Cologne. In 2014-2015 his solo project “The Body of Energy (of the mind)” was presented at a series of European museums, such as the MAXXI Museum in Rome, Madre Museum in Naples, Maga Museum in Gallarate, Museion in Bolzano, Kunsthalle St. Gallen, ZKM in Karlsruhe, Museum Folkwang in Essen, Landmark / Bergen Kunsthall. Among grants and awards he won the Visit prize of Innogy Foundation in 2014 (Germany) and the Terna Prize for Contemporary Art in 2009 (Italy). He has been selected for many artist in residence programs including: Ruhr Residence 2016; Cambridge Sustainability Residency 2016; Air Bergen; BAR International in Kirkenes; International Studio and Curatorial Program ISCP in New York; ICP-International Center of Photography in New York. Stefano Cagol Lives and works in Trento.

Janet Laurence

Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef (2015), HD video 32’58”

Janet Laurence’s video Deep Breathing – Resuscitation for the Reef (2015), and accompanying photo series Corral Collapse Homeopathy (2015) were created for the UN Climate Conference,COP21, in Paris. Shot in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef – a World Heritage site which is the planet’s largest living, and rapidly dying, structure – this series of works envisions a hospital for the Reef’s threatened corals and other marine species, making visible the otherwise invisible devastation beneath the surface of the sea, and offering hope for the healing of the marine world from the consequences of global warming and human impact. If we can care for marine life in the same way that we care for our own species, there is a chance of deflecting environmental catastrophe. Laurence’s work is an emergency response: a hospital for the Reef in this time of ecological crisis, intended to aid survival and effect transformation.

Janet Laurence – BIO

Janet Laurence (b. 1947 in Sydney, Australia) is among Australia’s most established artists. In 2015 she was the Australian representative for the COP21/FIAC, Artists 4 Paris Climate Exhibition for the UN Climate Conference in Paris, for which she created Deep Breathing – Resuscitation for the Reef and Coral Collapse Homeopathy, both shown in this exhibition. Further selected recent international projects and exhibitions include: the 57th Biennale of Venice (2017); Veiling Medical Glass, A Medicinal Maze, Novartis Campus, Sydney (2017); The Treelines Track, Bundanon, Australia (2017); GASP: Parliament, Hobart, Tasmania (2017); Inside the Flower, IGA Berlin (2017); Schloss Biesdorf, Centre for Art and Public Space, Berlin (2017); Fellowship at the Hanse-WissenschaftKolleg (HWK), Germany (2016-2017); H2O Water Bar, Paddington Water Reservoir, Sydney (2016); Deep Breathing (Resuscitation for the Reef), Australian Museum, Sydney (2016); Cuenca Bienal, Cuenca, Ecuador (2016); Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef, Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris (2015); The Skullbone Experiment: A Paradigm of Art and Nature, Queen Victoria Museum, Tasmania (2014); Animate/Inanimate, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healsville, Victoria, Australia (2013); 1⁄2 Scene, Australia China Art Foundation Shanghai (2013); SCANZ: 3rd Nature, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2013); After Eden, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney (2012); The Alchemical Garden of Desire, McClelland Gallery, Victoria, Australia (2012). Janet Laurence is a recipient of Rockefeller, Churchill, and Australia Council Fellowships, and the Alumni Award for Arts, University of New South Wales. She was a Trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, a former Board Member of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, and is a Visiting Fellow at the New South Wales University Art and Design. Janet Laurence lives and works in Sydney.

Almagul Menlibayeva

Transoxania Dreams
2011, HD video

Almagul Menlibayeva has been commissioned to create a series of works for the FAW2019 campaign. We are also proud to screen her video Transoxania Dreams (2011). Menlibayeva  films mythological narratives placed and staged in the vast landscape of her native Kazakhstan, ravaged by 60 years of Soviet occupation. She leads her audience to the brutally changed region of the Aral Sea where its indigenous people live in the Aralkum, the desert of a once-thriving region now entirely devoid of water due to radical Soviet irrigation politics.

The region of Transoxiana (Greek for ‘across the Oxus’) in southwestern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, once the eastern part of the Hellenistic regime under Alexander the Great and the former homeland of the nomadic tribes of Persia and Turan at the banks of the Oxus River, remained an important trade region along the Northern Silk Road with flourishing civilizations and fertile plains for many centuries. Afflicted by former Soviet policies and abandoned by commercial and cultural interests, today, Transoxiana lies bare and stripped in a surreal state of existence with discarded fishing fleets on dusty terrain, ravaged by metal scavengers while its inhabitants look on as the sea keeps receding into a far and unreachable distance of a seemingly better world. Menlibayeva tells the tale of a young fisherman’s daughter who observes the dramatic changes to the landscape of the Aral region and its population through a child’s eyes in a dreamlike mélange of documentary and fantasy. Menlibayeva visually walks the viewer through a vacant landscape and a symbolic dream whereby the girl’s father searches for the remaining sea and new fishing grounds while encountering strange and seductive four-legged female creatures (Centaurs) on his way through the hostile desert. Drawing on the image of the Greek mythological figure of the Centaur, Menlibayeva creates alluring hybrid beings, both sexually charged and bizarre. According to the legend, when the ancient Greeks first encountered the nomads of the Transoxianian Steppes on their horses, they initially believed them to be mythological quadruped, part person part animal, fearing their savage and magical powers. In Transoxiana Dreams Menlibayeva, a pictorial sorceress herself, breeds an eccentric storyline and fantastical imagery extracted deeply from her own atavistic repertoire; leading us visually through an existing, yet unimaginable, landscape in a distant and hypnagogic world.

Almagul Menlibayeva – BIO

Video artist and photographer Almagul Menlibayeva (b. 1969 in Almaty, Kazakh SSR) holds an MFA from the Art and Theatre University of Almaty. She works primarily in multi-channel video, photography and mixed media installation and her work addresses such critical issues of post-Soviet modernity as social, economic, and political, transformations in Central Asia, de-colonial re-imaginings of gender, environmental degradation, and Eurasian nomadic and indigenous cosmologies and mythologies.

In conjunction with her solo exhibition Transformation at the Grand Palais in Paris (France, 2016-2017), she was awarded the prestigious Chevalier Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture in 2017. She was also the Winner of the Main Prize of the International Film Festival Kino Der Kunst (2013) in Munich, Germany. Menlibayeva has gained international recognition by participating in: the Venice Biennale, Italy (2005, 2007, 2009, 2015); Sydney Biennale, Australia (2006, 2012); the Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2010); the Mediterranean Biennale, Israel (2010); the Moscow Biennale, Russia (2011, 2015); the Kiev Biennial, Ukraine (2013); the Daegu Photo Biennale (2016); and the Gangwon International Biennale, South Korea (2018). Selected solo exhibitions include: Videoart at Midnight #98: Almagul Menlibayeva, Berlin (2018); Transformation, Grand Palais, Paris, France (2016-2017); Union of Fire and Water, 56th Venice Biennial, Italy (2015); Transoxiana Dreams, Videozone, Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany (2014); An Ode for the Wastelands and Gulags, Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria (2013); Daughters of Turan, Casal Solleric, Palma De Mallorca, Spain (2012); LATT: Europe at large #6, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst (M HKA), Antwerp, Belgium (2010); Kissing Totems, Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, New York, USA (2008). Recent selected group exhibitions include: Haifa Museum, Israel (2018); Neues Museum in Nuremberg, Germany (2018, 2016); Astana State Museum, Kazakhstan (2018, 2016); Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium (2017-2020, 2010); National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST), Greece (2017). Almagul Menlibayeva lives and works in Almaty and Berlin.

Shingo Yoshida

Réprouvé
2018, 4K video, 3’37”

Photographer and video artist Shingo Yoshida finds inspiration in travelling, myths, traditions and the overwhelming beauty of nature. Yoshida considers the world as his studio and therefore a place of constant creation. In his video and photographic works Yoshida expresses his deep reverence for nature and its power, as well as his sense of wonder at encountering new cultures and ways of living. Shot in Calama, Chile, Shingo Yoshida’s film Réprouvé takes us through a garbage-strewn wasteland at the edge of the city, where the artist creates an oasis of beauty, turning discarded bear bottles into a sound installation. In an exhibition about water, Réprouvé is striking for its very absence of water. Creating beauty in the most unlikely of places, it is nevertheless a frightening glimpse of what our planet may soon look like if we do not take better care of our most necessary natural resource – water.

Shingo Yoshida – BIO

Shingo Yoshida, born in 1974 in Tokyo, and currently lives and works in Berlin. Yoshida received his MA with highest honors from Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Villa Arson in Nice France in 2004. In 2005 he earned a post-graduate diploma at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, France, and subsequently in 2007 he received another post-graduate diploma in the Program La Seine of Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. in 2013 Yoshida completed the prestigious international artist residencies at Villa Arson Nice France – Centre National d’Art Contemporain, and was awarded the Fellowship of Overseas Study Programme for Artists by the Agency for Cultural Affairs of the Japanese Government. Yoshida’s work has been shown in many international exhibitions, including: Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2007, 2012); the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo MAC, Santiago, Chile (2012); the 60th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany, (2014); Videoart at Midnight #67: Shingo Yoshida, BABYLON, Berlin (2015); POLARIZED! Vision Competition Winner, Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland (2015); Gunma Museum of Art, Tatebayashi, Gunma, Japan (2016); Mulliqi Prize, National Gallery of Arts, Prishtina, Kosovo (2016); Instituto Zappa (Accademia Di Brera) Viale Marche, Milan, Italy (2016); Onufri International Prize, National Gallery of Arts, Tirana (2016); IkonoTV (2017). In 2016 Shingo Yoshida’s works entered into the following Collections in Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, Akademie der Künste, and Fluentum.

READ THE INTERVIEW WITH THE ARTIST