Mação, Portugal, from July 6th to August 10th 2023 Guest curated by Cécile Bourne-Farrell
Invited artists: Alberto Lopez Baena and Manuel Prados, Sara Bichão, Márcio Carvalho, Gilles Clément, Mikhail Karikis, Florence Lazar , Josèfa Ntjam, Uriel Orlow, Corinne Silva, Lawrence Smail, James Webb
More information on: https://adobradica.com
Saatchi Gallery, London
2 June to 17 September
Curated by William A Ewing & Holly Roussell Perret-Gentil
“This landmark exhibition tracks the visual threads of humanity’s ever-changing, extraordinarily complex life across the globe, through the eyes of 150 of the world’s most accomplished photographers. Featuring many previously unseen images, Civilization acknowledges the diverse material and spiritual cultures that make up global societies today, spanning Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and the Americas. Exploring a wide range of subjects, from our great united achievements to our collective failings, Civilization: The Way We Live Now highlights the complexity and contradictions of contemporary civilization.”
Artists: Max Aguilera-Hellweg, Andreia Alves de Oliveira, Evan Baden, Murray Ballard, Olivo Barbieri, Mandy Barker, Lisa Barnard, Olaf Otto Becker, Valérie Belin, Daniel Berehulak, Mathieu Bernard-Reymond, Peter Bialobrzeski, Florian Böhm, Michele Borzoni, Priscilla Briggs, Paul Bulteel, Edward Burtynsky, Antony Cairns, Alejandro Cartagena, Philippe Chancel, Edmund Clark, Che Onejoon, Olivier Christinat, Lynne Cohen, Lois Conner, Raphaël Dallaporta, Siân Davey, Susan Derges, Gerco de Ruijter, Richard de Tscharner, Sergey Dolzhenko, Natan Dvir, Roger Eberhard, Mitch Epstein, Andrew Esiebo, Adam Ferguson, Vincent Fournier, Jermaine Francis, Andy Freeberg, Matthieu Gafsou, Andreas Gefeller, George Georgiou, Christoph Gielen, Ashley Gilbertson, Katy Grannan, Samuel Gratacap, Lauren Greenfield, Han Sungpil, Nick Hannes, Sean Hemmerle, Mishka Henner, South Ho Siu Nam, Candida Höfer, Dan Holdsworth, Hong Hao, Aimée Hoving, Pieter Hugo, Tiina Itkonen, Leila Jeffreys, Jo Choonman, Chris Jordan, Nadav Kander, KDK, Mike Kelley, Kim Taedong, Alfred Ko, Irene Kung, Benny Lam, Sonia Lenzi, Gjorgji Lichovski, Michael Light, Mauricio Lima, Sheng-Wen Lo, Pablo López Luz, Christian Lünig, Alex MacLean, David Maisel, Ann Mandelbaum, Edgar Martins, Jeffrey Milstein, Mintio, Richard Misrach, Andrew Moore, David Moore, Richard Mosse, Michael Najjar, Walter Niedermayr, Noh Suntag, Simon Norfolk, Trent Parke, Cara Phillips, Robert Polidori, Sergey Ponomarev, Cyril Porchet, Mark Power, Giles Price, Yan Wang Preston, Reiner Riedler, Simon Roberts, Andrew Rowat, Victoria Sambunaris, Sato Shintaro, Dona Schwartz, Paul Shambroom, Chen Shaoxiong, Nigel Shafran, Toshio Shibata, Corinne Silva, Niki Simpson, Alec Soth, Jem Southam, Henrik Spohler, Will Steacy, Thomas Struth, Larry Sultan, Shigeru Takato, Eric Thayer, Danila Tkachenko, Eason Tsang Ka Wai, Andreas Tschersich, Amalia Ulman, Brian Ulrich, Penelope Umbrico, Johanna Urschel, Carlo Valsecchi, Cássio Vasconcellos, Reginald Van de Velde, Massimo Vitali, Robert Walker, Dougie Wallace, Richard Wallbank, Wang Qingsong, Patrick Weidmann, Thomas Weinberger, Damon Winter, Michael Wolf, Paolo Woods and Gabriele Galimberti, Raimond Wouda, Xing Danwen, Ahmad Zamroni, Luca Zanier, Zhang Xiao, Robert Zhao Renhui, Francesco Zizola.
Accidental Topography I, Oasys theme park, Almería, Spain, 2011, 101cm x 81cm
MOMus-Museum of Contemporary Art
4 March to 21 May 2023
The central exhibition of the 8th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art proposes a re-examination: a re-examination of life as a society, but also of co-existence as a tool to deal with the multiple crises we are experiencing. The question of co-existence is examined through the works of 28 artists/artists who focus on various forms of mediation between different subjects, living and dead, species and environments. The emphasis now shifts to the practices of care, love, sharing, mutual support and inclusiveness as life attitudes. Artistic groups and artists investigate the effects of human activity on threatened ecosystems, the possible scenarios of sustainable and harmonious coexistence.
Artists: Jumana Emil Abboud , Paky Vlassopoulou , Gianfranco Baruchello , Campus Novel , Aslı Çavuşoğlu , Phoebe Giannisis , COYOTE , Cevdet Erek , Zheng Bo , Piero Gilardi , Sky Hopinka , Akira Ikezoe , Vaso Katraki , Jumana Manna , Ahmed Morsi , Hira Nabi , Abraham Onoriode Oghobase , Yiannis Papadopoulos , Alexandra Paperno , Angelos Plessas , Iva Radivojević , Kostas Roussakis , Corinne Silva , Panos Sklavenitis , Agnès Varda , Ana Vaz , Vessel (Navine G. Dossos and James Bridle) , Thanasis Xondros & Alexandra Katsiani
Curator: Maria-Thalia Carras
Assistant curators: Fotini Salvaridis & Manto Psarelli
Flames Among Stones, installation view, photograph by Stefanos Tsakiris
Corinne Silva, Flames Among Stones, two channel video with 5.1 sound and textile, 2019/2022. Untitled video still.
The Arcade, Kings College London, The Strand
7 February to 3 March 2023
Curated by Vivienne Jabri and Cécile Bourne-Farrell
The Score (You and I Both Know), explores the impact of war on populations living in the aftermath of conflict.
The exhibition forms part of Conflict and Injury, a research project from King’s College London Department of War Studies investigating how war inflicts injuries on individuals, communities and their lived environments.
Silva draws on several years of research and practice in Bosnia and Herzegovina to present this new series of works exploring the consequences of the Bosnian War on bodies, landscapes and memory, as well as the remarkable resilience and solidarity of those affected.
Through an installation of photographs and sound The Score (You and I Both Know) transports viewers to the siege of Sarajevo and the embodied, material and auditory cartography of violence. The deeply resonant exhibition is testimony to injury and resistance in the face of the deliberate targeting of civilian populations in time of war, capturing the scenes and sounds of lived experience during conflict and its aftermath.
Silva’s primary focus is a row of linden trees along the River Miljacka that mark Sarajevo’s former frontline; the only trees that remained in the city after the siege as their location was too dangerous for anyone to risk felling them. As well as being witnesses to the conflict, these trees were also active participants, forming a living shield to sniper fire. Today, their role is immortalised in their trunks and branches which bear the scars of the war. The works are complemented by a haunting voice singing a former Yugoslavian partisan song celebrating the forest as a place of safety.
Read an interview with the artist and curator Cécile Bourne-Farrell here.
Corinne Silva, Untitled I, The Score (You and I Both Know), 2023
Festival of Mediterranean Citizens, Catania, Sicily
2 to 5 June 2022
Two Mediterranean journeys: one by land and one by sea.
A woman dedicates her life to walk its coastlines and confront every castle and watchtower she finds.
The longer she studies them, the more they change form, disintegrating before her eyes, returning to the rocks they came from.
A woman sets sail across the sea in the hope of finding her sailor.
She checks every port, every ship. And yet her longing seems to surpass the quest for her lost love.
Tavros, Athens
3 February - 7 May 2022
Curated by Maria-thalia Carras
Artists: Etel Adnan, Meriç Algün, Francis Alÿs with Julien Deveaux, The Athens Zine Bibliotheque, Sena Başöz, Eric Baudelaire, Euphrosyne Doxiadi, FRMK, Konstantinos Giotis, Karrabing Film Collective, Lala Meredith-Vula, The Otolith Group, Malvina Panagiotidi, Corinne Silva, Praneet Soi, Ritu Sarin & Tenzing Sonam, Sasha Streshna.
There is Nothing inevitable About Time is neither a statement of certainty, nor a question, but a persistent intent, a hovering thought, a shared wonder and a desire to comprehend.
It is an exhibition of sorts, fluctuating in form with three overlapping chapters, with art works in dialogue with each other for variable measurements of time, a day, a month or so, or even three. It is an experiment that proposes a psycho-kinetic system with its own internal logic. Subverting the belief in linear progress, the exhibition proposes a time and spatialization of form that undulates, looks forward and back, sideways and frontally, toying with ideas of impermanence, causality, suggestive of elective affinities and emergent possibilities.
Each artwork is of course its own autonomous universe, touching on interlocking themes such as cyclicality, indigenous knowledge, ancestral callings, the ghosts of the past and future, acceleration, the time span of making: of being and becoming. Yet, simultaneously, the selected works relate to each other in an unfolding durational choreography allowing for shifting meanings and conversations. Time it is suggested, is a relational experience, a field of in between states, a temporal co-existence.
As Jean-Luc Nancy writes, “the space-time itself is first of all the possibility of the ‘with’[1].”
The word ‘time’ derives from an Indo-European root, di or dai – meaning to divide. But who does the dividing and what indeterminate space lies in between? The grammars of most modern languages conjugate verbs in past, present, future tenses – not well adapted for speaking about shifting temporalities. Time slips like language. And yet words rush behind, never really to contain the immeasurable potentialities of what we feel. Time and again, seemingly unavoidable as our daily look in the mirror, the human mind has tried to wrap itself around understanding the pace of who we are. Why do we remember the past and not the future? Do we exist in time or does time exist in us? Where does it begin?
Thinking of time as a human desire and need for remembrance led us to collaborate with FRMK, a Greek poetry collective on a publication of a selection of poems circling around time and the language we use to talk about everything it affects, the who and the how of our lives, the past as present, its reciprocity. Expanding the intersubjective space of the exhibition field further, these poems will be disseminated both at the exhibition and in the form of posters in the city around us in digital and analogue forms. These poems can be read as a prologue, interlude or postscript of the exhibition. The linguistic (pre)memory of everything you (will) have seen.
As Emmanuel Levinas writes, “The present rips apart and joins together again; it begins; it is beginning itself. It has a past, but in the form of remembrance. It has a history, but it is not history[2].”
At moments like ours, when future imaginaries are repeatedly negated, when the present feels fraught, when the tools we have to understand the world seem inadequate, it seems timely to wonder whether, There is Nothing Inevitable about Time?
[1] Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, Stanford University Press
[2] Emmanuel Levinas, Time and The Other, Duquesne University Press
Supported by:
SAHA – Supporting Contemporary Art From Turkey provided support for Sena Başöz, Iaspis, Swedish Institute at Athens, Perianth Hotel
Corinne Silva, Untitled photopolymer gravure, 2019, framed, glazed, 41.5x34.5cm
Meet Factory, Prague
29 June to 22 August 2021
The international group exhibition Planted in the Body looks into plants as sources and carriers of knowledge, and explores more precisely how the unique knowledge flora has been holding for centuries is transmitted. It highlights matrilineal and ancestral chains’ roles in preserving and passing down nature’s teachings. The latter are extremely diverse and touch on the realm of medicine, spirituality, survival skills, food practices, traumas and political memories.
At its core, the exhibition endorses the notion of ‘plantcestors’, considering that the non-linear knowledge channelled through vegetation can be accessed without intermediaries and is planted in our bodies. Common resources are our best teachers to live in ecological balance. This explains the importance of indigenous knowledges — ones that have been severely lost through the imperial, colonial and capitalist dominations — to learn how to live in harmony with the vegetal, animal, mineral, spiritual and ancestral worlds. In this, some works featured envision regenerative practices for landscapes, soils and bodies.
If plants are vessels, then we should act as recipients of their heritage. Works in the exhibition Planted in the Body address all these issues looking into our common kinship as well as into the future, and tell sidelined histories and narratives.
Artists: Nikola Brabcová (CZ) & Alexandra Cihanská Machová (SK), Laura Huertas Millán (CO), Suzanne Husky (FR/USA), Saodat Ismailova (UZ), Emily Kame Kngwarreye (AU), Uriel Orlow (CH/UK), Solange Pessoa (BR), Luiza Prado de O. Martins (BR), Corinne Silva (UK), Adéla Součková (CZ). Curated by Clelia Coussonnet & Tereza Jindrová
Planted in the Body installation view, MeetFactory, Prague, 2021
FRIDAY 7 MAY 2021, 18.00 CET
Guests:
Corinne Silva, London/Athens
Marta Popivoda, Berlin/Belgrade
Moderator:
Armina Pilav, Un-war Space Lab/University of Sheffield, Toxic Lands curator/producer
The second online event from the interspecies encounter series ‘it could be poisonous’, part of Toxic Lands curatorial programme, will explore the context of ‘trees and bodies in destruction and resistance’. Toxic Lands curator Armina Pilav invites artist Corinne Silva and filmmaker Marta Popivoda to share their practices of understanding and representation of different war landscapes, including wounded trees, forests and survival bodies.
Register here
Eva Sajovic and Corinne Silva present their work on the Picturing Climate project alongside contributions from photographer Nichole Sobecki from the VII Photo Agency, and Mariateresa Salvati from Slideluck Editorial. Each speaker presented our different strategies for visualising and sharing knowledges and experiences on the climate emergency. Watch here
The symposium is organised by VII Photo Agency in partnership with University of the Arts London’s Photography and the Archive Research Centre & Climate Visuals.
Picturing Climate photography workshop led by Riera Studio, Havana. Photograph by Eva Sajovic, 2019
Iréne Laub Gallery, Brussels
10 March to 11 April 2020
Participating artists: Ivan Argote, Younes Baba-Ali, Shiraz Bayjoo, Eirene Efstathiou, Michéle Magema, Corinne Silva, Yonamine. Curated by Cécile Bourne-Farrell
A day doesn’t go by without us speaking about the resilience of human beings in the face of injustice, climate change or migration. Resilience is what allows us to go beyond ourselves, to believe in justice and to go beyond the agreed and the conforming, the beautiful and the ugly.
Applied to any place or situation, resilience is the ability to face and absorb disturbances and constraints in micro and mega events in our lives. Human beings constantly need to adapt their functioning and their attitude when confronted with disturbances, in order to start and manage the recovering process.
Artists face these challenges by anticipating them often with new propositions, shining a new light on the situation, allowing us to reflect, adapt and even change. Artists have the capacity to look differently at their peers and at the desperation with which certain human beings spend their lives fighting, crossing continents and seas, or rebuilding themselves in the face of loss and the need to exist.
This exhibition project addresses the capacity of resilience, which is present at the core of every human being and allows everyone to live in the present, to exceed it, as well as to share it. There are infinite ways to be resilient and each of the seven artists have their own way of sharing their aptitude to be resilient.
Iván Argote invites us to walk on words and Corinne Silva proposes to observe bullet impacts in the bark of trees in Sarajevo, while Eirene Efstathiou draws the way insurgents were hiding during the Greek civil war. Michèle Magema develops visual strategies to counter-act the damages of colonialism in Congo and Shiraz Bayjoo reveals to us haunted places in Mauritius. Still present today, savage capitalism is usurping natural sources as much as it is imposing its own values. Younes Baba-Ali and Yonamine operate on a poetic level to resist the alienation post-colonial countries are going through.
- Cécile Bourne-Farrell
Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, UK
16 Jan to 22 March 2020
Curated by Gary Bratchford
How do we visualise power? What does it look like, and for whom is it visible? Visual Rights looks at how images can expose uneven distributions of power, and shape the way we understand a place’s geography.
From early attempts at mapping the world, to modern satellite imagery, territories – and people’s right to inhabit them – have continually been established and redrawn, contested or removed. This process often becomes concentrated in areas of conflict and geographical contest: in recent history, this has included Ireland, Kashmir and Ukraine. Visual Rights presents work from artists in Israel, Palestine and the UK to examine this process.
Visual Rights brings together different methods of revealing how power subtly operates and affects the fabric of everyday life. The perspectives include surveying underground water pipelines that allow non-native plant life to flourish, photographing areas that have their electricity supply cut off at night, and the view from drones — a view that has become synonymous with modern conflict.
Participating artists: Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Hagit Keysar, Yazan Khalili, Miki Kratsman and Shabtai Pinchevsky, and Corinne Silva.
Le Cube Independent Art Room, Rabat 14 November 2019 to 24 January 2020 Curated by Clelia Coussonet
Leave No Stone Unturned [Remuer la terre] is a collective exhibition, curated by Clelia Coussonnet, that highlights the links between plants and politics in Morocco and other countries of the global South, while rejecting the idea that nature is ornamental and neutral. By scratching the visible surface to plunge into the interstices and gaps of history, the selected works show plants are intertwined in power networks and suffer from the paradox of being knowledge resources simultaneously accessible and subjected to processes of invisibility. While human impact on climate and environmental change is increasingly discussed in public and scientific debates, still few institutions and individuals explore in depth the largely underestimated relations between plants and politics. Flora is indeed an actor, a pawn and a witness of History, revealing narratives forgotten and eluded by official history’s records.
In this, the long-lasting relationship between conquest and botany during the eras of imperialism and colonialism is particularly significant. Amongst other strategies, Western empires widely resorted to naturalist and scientific expeditions to map the territories they then dominated and exploited. Today, in the age of globalisation, nature is still intertwined at various scales in local, national and international power relations.
Within this global framework, the exhibition Leave No Stone Unturned [Remuer la terre]focuses more precisely on the notions of natural resistance and of traditional healing techniques and remedies approaching flora both as an allegory of political frictions (from independence to opposition and diplomacy) and as a system of meaning, knowledge and beliefs in its own right (navigating between use, transmission and oblivion). Artists included in the show have long-term and research-based processes that enable us to re-read history through new perspectives.
Participating artists: Hanan Benammar, Sasha Huber & Petri Saarikko, Farah Khelil, Kipwani Kiwanga, Uriel Orlow, Corinne Silva
A 2030 SHOW TRIAL: Part-theatre, part-art installation, and part-people’s court.
13th and 14th July 12-6pm
We are 11 years in the future and the Establishment is to be placed on trial for its negligence in tackling climate breakdown. You as jurors will decide the verdict.
Join Plan B , 198 Contemporary Arts & Learning, Extinction Rebellion People’s Bureau , UAL London College of Communication, True Name Theatre and Guerrilla Foundation for the trial of the year.
See here for press release and full programme.
82 Kingsland Road, London, E2 8DP
12 July - 31 August 2019
The exhibition Her Ground: Women Photographing Landscape aims to highlight the contributions made by women to contemporary photography, and address ideas of how landscape can be viewed through the female gaze.
Participating artists: Lisa Barnard, Maja Daniels, Rikke Fledsberg, Scarlett Hooft Graafland, Mona Kuhn, Kristin Man, Anastasia Samoylova, Corinne Silva, Dafna Talmor
Download press release here.
installation view of Garden State, Her Ground: Women Photographing Landscape, Flowers Gallery, London, 2019
17 April to 3 May 2019
London College of Communication
Curated by Max Houghton & David Birkin
Collaborative exhibition and events programme bringing together artists, activists, journalists, civil liberties groups, human rights lawyers and media students from UAL’s London College of Communication. participating artists include Poulomi Basu, David Blandy and Larry Achiampong, Abd Doumany, Edmund Clarke, David Birkin, Corinne Silva, Nathaniel White.
Lines in the Landscape, Landscape Now, Issue 10, Autumn 2018, British Art Studies
Abstract: The landscape historian W.G. Hoskins is widely credited as a pioneer of local and landscape history. His 1955 book, The Making of the English Landscape, and the guidebooks and television series he wrote and contributed to, made a historical narrative of the English landscape available to a broad public. Hoskins’ work was radical—with so much of England damaged after the Second World War, Hoskins and his collaborator, the photographer F.L. Attenborough, gave ruination a context and insisted on the timelessness and permanence of the English landscape. This article describes the cultural and historical contexts that inform Lines in the Landscape, a new research project by the artist Corinne Silva and the curator/writer Val Williams, which will retrace the footsteps of Hoskins and Attenborough during their collaboration on the 1948 guidebook Touring Leicestershire. It also explores the project’s intention to discover the visual embodiments of change in urban and rural landscapes, and to explore the possibilities of interdisciplinarity and partnership in scholarship today.
You can follow our research on Instagram @ruins_and_reveals
“Amid lives increasingly dominated by technology, the natural world offers us both a challenge and a retreat. In these photographic essays, we explore how humans enjoy nature, chronicle it and try to bend it to their will.” Financial Times magazine, 5/6 January 2019
Featuring my work Garden State with a new essay by Shela Sheikh, and works by Anna Atkins, Stephen Gil, Rinko Kawauchi, Chrystel Lebas, Sebastian Meija, Amani Willett.
We have received funding from the AHRC to help set-up a new research network. Led by Agnes Czajka of the Open University, it will bring together researchers and grassroots arts and culture organisations across four distinct socio-cultural and physical countries – Cuba, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Jordan and the UK – to explore the potential of arts and humanities-based methodologies for developing local and international educational capacity on climate change-induced food and livelihoods insecurities. This is part of my ongoing work with Eva Sajovic.
The project is a collaboration with the Open University (Agnes Czajka); International Burch University (Dzeneta Karabegovic and Jasmin Hasic); Counterpoints Arts; grassroots organisations in Cuba (Riera Studio), Bosnia and Herzegovina (Most Mira), and Jordan (Auranitis); and Eva Sajovic.
We begin our work in Cuba in April 2019 with Riera Studio . A Learning Lab and public programme will take place at Tate Exchange Tate Modern, London, in late 2019. Website here Instagram: @picturingclimate
IVAM Valencia 29 November 2018 to 14 April 2019
Beyond the idyllic view of the Mediterranean Sea portrayed in the early 20th century by northern painters who were fascinated by its light, the Mediterranean has encompassed a superimposition, mingling and confrontation of languages, cultures and religions since the beginning of history. It is also an urban context, consisting of historic cities that have been destroyed and rebuilt, illusory holiday agglomerations and camps of people who do not have access to the city.
The Mediterranean has been a home for citizens since ancient Greece, which involves rejection of people who make it possible for the city to live but to whom the status of citizen is not granted, and it forms the setting for habits and customs and ways of life, shaped by a habitat that allows them to breathe or constricts them. The Mediterranean Sea is water that runs deep.
Inhabiting the Mediterranean is an exhibition with a mosaic of images, of ancient and contemporary works, of artists from all its shores, all translating the complex, contradictory, inclusive and exclusive image of peoples and cities, erected with walls that allow passage or present a barrier, beneath a light that illuminates or blinds.
Curated by Pedro Azara. Participating artists: Herbert List, Anna Marín, Camille Henrot, Ali Cherri, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Marwan Rechmaoui, Rayyane Tabet, Susan Hefuna, Zarina Hashmi, Dora García, Le Corbusier, Ismaïl Bahri, Joan Hernández Pijuan, Juan Muñoz, Hrair Sarkissian, Sergi Aguilar, Gabriele Basilico, Abbas Kiarostami, Taysir Batniji, Jordi Colomer, José Manuel Ballester, Juan Uslé, Marie Menken, Maria Lai, Albert García-Alzórriz, Dieter Roth and Richard Hamilton, Till Roeskens, Massinissa Selmani, Anne-Marie Filaire, Mohammed Al-Hawajri, Majd Abdel Hamid, Khaled Jarrar, Rami Farah, Randa Mirza, Anila Rubiku, Kader Attia, Martin Parr, Vasantha Yogananthan, Julia Schulz-Dornburg, Carlos Spottorno, Corinne Silva, Yazan Khalili, Efrat Shvily.
More information here.
10 October - 13 January 2019 Zarya Center for Contemporary Art, Vladivostok
Metageography 3: Orientalism and Dreams of Robinsons is the third instalment of the curatorial project by Kirill Svetlyakov and Nikolay Smirnov, Metageography: Space – Image – Action, which was developed especially for the Far East and realized in collaboration with the State Tretyakov Gallery.
I’m premiering a two channel video work Night Circuits (2018)
See here for more information on the show.