around which a vast edifice of human responses has arisen

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‘… where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result fit into the life of someone, […], who also cared about justice and truth and human rights and how to change the world.”

“… a particular kind of flower around which a vast edifice of human responses has arisen”

“Even as ornament, flowers represent life itself, as fertility, mortality, transience, extravagance, and as such they enter our art, rites, and language.” – Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses.

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Poetics of Relation

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Exhibition at Pérez Art Museum Miami, 2015, curated Tumelo Mosaka and Tobias Ostrander.

“Over the past several decades, many artistic investigations of identity have engaged the human figure as the site for negotiating these historical and contemporary dynamics. Representations of the body have often propagated these binary positions by specifically looking to structure, for the viewer, an experience of inclusion or exclusion from the cultural identities depicted.
Our attraction as curators to the writings of Glissant and his theory of Relation derives from the richly nonbinary character of his articulation of identity. His interest in multiplicity and the stress he places on seeking encounters with an other-or with many others as an integral part of our own understanding of self feels congruent with our contemporary moment. His emphasis on our “mutual mutations by this interplay of relations,” resonates in a globalized world defined by migrations that merge our varied homelands with one another and with foreign, often conflicting contexts. Landscape, as a subject and form through which to address identity, offers unique and perhaps more open-ended aesthetic options for artists to pursue currently. Compared with figuration, landscape can offer greater points of entry today and multiple layers of signification to both artists and viewers. As the artworks in this exhibition demonstrate, the form can subtly generate the experience of both beauty and trauma simultaneously, of histories negotiated and lived in the present and understood as representations of identities in continual flux and formation.” – Tobias Ostrander.

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… site for the lyrical arrangement of forms.