And if I devoted my life to one of its feathers?
A joint exhibition of Kunsthalle Wien and Wiener Festwochen
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15 May -
26 September, 2021
Curated by Miguel A. Lopez
I am showing The Parasite Series for the first time in the group show And if I devoted my life to one of its feathers? This joint exhibition of Kunsthalle Wien and Wiener Festwochen, is curated by Peruvian-based independent curator Miguel A. López with the support of Curatorial Assistant, Laura Amann combines works by more than 35 artists from around the world, located everywhere from the Amazon region to Australia, from Guatemala to India.
“And if I devoted my life to one of its feathers?” writes the Chilean poet, artist, and activist Cecilia Vicuña in an untitled poem from the late 1960s/early 1970s. With this question Vicuña counters anthropocentric and hetero-patriarchal urges with healing and appreciation, reviving the aesthetic and spiritual bonds between human and non-human entities and worlds.
In keeping with these aspirations, the exhibition curated by Miguel A. López, reflects on the rationale of exploitation, the fast-paced mining of raw materials, and environmental destruction as a colonial legacy. It tells the story of Indigenous struggles for collective survival and celebrates encounters defined by solidarity in their resistance to misogyny, imperialist violence, and state oppression. Some of the contributions are a specific response to the Covid-19 pandemic – not just as a health crisis, but also as one of ecological and social justice.”
Excerpt from exhibition guide: “In her practice, Annalee Davis addresses the experience of living and working in Barbados, an island in the Caribbean that declared its independence from the United Kingdom in 1966. She revisits the history of the land where her white Creole family lived as a way to explore the colonial past, post-plantation economies, and the raced, classed, and gendered realities of the Caribbean social landscapes. In 2014, Davis began making graphic interventions on twentieth-century ledger pages to create new connections with the memory of the plantation as a site of trauma.
Davis’s Parasite Series (2018–2019), which is being exhibited here for the first time, is inspired by Cuban author Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s critical text The Repeating Island (1992, originally published in Spanish in 1989) and Evelyn O’Callaghan’s introduction (2002) to the nineteenth-century novel With Silent Tread by Frieda Cassin. Some of the works in the series depict women looking around them suspiciously or wrestling with what Davis calls the “long parasites of history,” combining symbols the artist took from a 1966 land-use survey in Barbados, a list of soil types, and erosion categories used to impose and control monocrops (specifically, sugarcane). Another image presents a woman standing on top of a mill expurgating a long parasite, which represents healing by divesting oneself of contaminated history.”
