Toxic Lands is a part of FUTURE ECOLOGIES, a programme from WE ARE HERE: Artists’ Moving Image developed by Tendai John Mutambu, British Council and LUX. It's an exhibition and series of events in Bosnia and Herzegovina that aims to spark critical discussions among the general audience and professional artists while analysing human destructive impact in a broader sense.
It explores the effects of the Anthropocene (the current geological age where humans have been the dominant influence on the environment), military conflicts, ecology, cosmology, climate change, Western colonial practices and extractive industries.
Author and curator of the programme is Armina Pilav (see her biography below). The program is produced in collaboration with Damir Ugljen, Un-war Space Lab collective, Association for Culture and Art Crvena from Sarajevo and Abraš Radio from Mostar. You can read what Armina says about the programme in her curatorial statement here.
The programme took place from 21 to 26 June 2021 in Mostar at various locations and where visitors could enjoy in artists’ performances, screenings, readings and a public walk. Find pictures from the exhibition here.
The first event of the Toxic Lands curatorial programme, ‘It could be poisonous’, introduced the exhibition and interspecies encounters organised at different venues in Mostar and across social media from March to July 2021. The event took place online on the Zoom platform and was live streamed on the Radio Abraš Mostar Facebook page and afterwards as a podcast on the Radio web. You can watch the event on our YouTube channel.
Curator
Armina Pilav, Un-war Space Lab/University of Sheffield, Toxic Lands curator - Feminist, architect, researcher and lecturer at the Department of Landscape Architecture, The University of Sheffield. Armina uses cross-media tools, psychospatiality and radical observations to expose ecologies of transformations of rivers, land and related natural forms, architectures and society.
Armina is founder of Un-war Space Lab and member of the Association for Culture and Art Crvena in Sarajevo.
Artists' biographies
Louis Henderson - Filmmaker and writer who experiments with different ways of working with people to address and question our current global condition defined by racial capitalism and ever-present histories of the European colonial project. The working method is archaeological.
Uriel Orlow - lives and works between London, Lisbon and Zurich. Orlow’s practice is research-based, process-oriented and multi-disciplinary including film, photography, drawing and sound. He is known for single screen film works, lecture performances and modular, multi-media installations that focus on specific locations and micro-histories. His work is concerned with spatial manifestations of memory, blind spots of representation and forms of haunting.
Charlotte Prodger - a Glasgow-based artist working with moving image, writing, sculpture and printmaking. She was the winner of the 2018 Turner Prize and represented Scotland at the 2019 Venice Biennale. She received the 2017 Paul Hamlyn Award and the 2014 Margaret Tait Award.
Ben Rivers - studied sculpture before moving into photography and super8 film. After his degree he taught himself 16mm filmmaking and hand-processing. His practice as a filmmaker treads a line between documentary and fiction.