Bioart + Design Africa

VIAD

Imminent and Eminent Ecologies

Orlow’s work has been shown internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals, including the 54th Venice Biennale (2011), Manifesta 9 (2012), Lubumbashi Biennale (2013), Bergen Assembly (2013), Sharjah Biennale 13 (2017), and the 2nd edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014). Recent exhibitions include The Fairest Heritage at the Kunsthaus Baselland in Muttenz (2018); Soil Affinities at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton (2018); Affinités des sols at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Paris (2019); Conversing with Leaves at The Showroom, London (2020); Mafavuke’s Trial at Center for Contemporary Art, Lagos (2017); Theatrum Botanicum at Market Photo Workshop, Johannesburg (2018); and Learning from Artemisia at QANAT, Marrakech (2019). 

Orlow was shortlisted for the Jarman Award in 2013 and was the recipient of the Swiss Art Award in 2015. He has been artist-in-residence at various institutions worldwide, including Gasworks in London, Villa Romana in Florence, and La Box in Bourges. Orlow has also taught Fine Art at the University of Westminster, London, and the Zurich University of the Arts. He has published widely on topics related to visual culture and post-colonial theory, and his works are held in public collections in Europe, the USA, and South Africa. 

General Artist Statement 

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, microhistories and forms of haunting. Working across installation, photography, film, drawing and sound his works bring different image regimes and narrative modes into correspondence.  

Specific Artist Statement on The Fairest Heritage 

In 1963, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the founding of Kirstenbosch, the national botanical garden of South Africa in Cape Town commissioned a series of films to document the history of the garden, the Cape Floral Kingdom, and the jubilee celebrations with their ‘national’ dances, pantomimes of colonial conquests, and visits from international botanists. The films’ protagonists—the scientists and visitors etc—are all white; the only Africans featured are labourers. Considered neutral and passive, flowers were excluded from the boycott until the late 1980s and so botanical nationalism and flower diplomacy flourished unchecked at home and internationally. The films have not been seen since 1963 and were found by the artist in the cellar of the library of the botanical garden. Orlow collaborated with actor Lindiwe Matshikiza who puts herself and her body in these loaded pictures, inhabiting and confronting the found footage and thus contesting history and the archive itself.