É a lama, é a lama (It’s the mud, it’s the mud)
- Maria Thereza Alves • Tapfuma Gutsa • ikkibawiKrrr
- Oswaldo Maciá • Uriel Orlow
4th August– 16th September 2023
Elizabeth Xi Bauer presents É a lama, é a lama, an exhibition of four contemporary artists and one artist group whose practices acknowledge our climate emergency. In É a lama, é a lama, each of them turn their gaze to one aspect of our planet, depicting elements such as flora, fauna, water, fire, geological formations and typhoons to address global warming.
The artists in this exhibition are from four continents, thus bringing together various cultural backgrounds that share concerns surrounding the health of our ecosystem. They further share an understanding of the earth as a holistic body, where the wellbeing of one part is indissociable from the wellbeing of the whole.
The exhibition title, Portuguese for ‘it’s the mud, it’s the mud’, is borrowed from Tom Jobim’s eponymous Águas de Março (Waters of March), which the musician wrote in both English and Portuguese. By doing so, Jobim signified the rain-showers that are characteristic of March – or at least used to be – through two geographical perspectives: the Global South, where the rains signal summer is over, and the Global North, whereby turn the phenomena welcomes spring. The announcement of the mud has an eerie parallel with Maria Thereza Alves’ sculptural painting Rio Doce: Sweet No More (2017), which depicts the Samarco dam disaster from 2015 that released several dozens of millions of cubic metres of mine tailings into the Doce River, in Brazil, which is a major water source for the Krenak people.
É a lama, é a lama will feature watercolours, on public display for the first time, by Maria Thereza Alves depicting flora, such as sunflowers. Accompanied by handwritten texts, these works describe the absurdities of colonial legacies, in her exploration of historical injustices. For example, in her work An Historical Aspect of the Landscape of Venice (Tinos) (2007), the artist presents to the viewer an explanation of Venice’s tourist tax. These are two diptychs and one triptych.
Alves has worked and exhibited internationally since the 1980s, creating a body of work investigating the histories and circumstances of particular localities to give witness to silenced histories. Her projects are research-based and develop out of her interactions with the physical and social environments of the places she lives, or visits, for exhibitions and residencies. These projects begin in response to local needs and proceed through a process of dialogue that is often facilitated between material and environmental realities and social circumstances. While aware of Western binaries between nature and culture, art and politics, or art and daily life, she deliberately refuses to acknowledge them in her practice. She chooses instead to work with people in communities as equals through relational practices of collaboration that require constant movement across all of these boundaries.
Tapfuma Gutsa’s work upcycles natural elements, re-signifying them, such as with: ruins, bones, pieces of wood, fruits and so on. The artist collects pieces from nature and gives them a second life through assemblages. For example, in The Cypher (2002), Gutsa connects a water buffalo horn with granite.
Tapfuma Gutsa’s practice, both as artist and workshop leader, explores the physical and metaphorical possibilities of materials, from oak to eggshell, bone and clay. His work both advances and subverts the tradition of stone sculpture that dominated Zimbabwean art through the 1960s and 1970s. Beyond the elegant confidence apparent in his choice of materials, he endows the objects he forms with an otherworldly power.
The two-channel video The Vine Chronicle (2016) by ikkibawiKrrr addresses the migration and evolution of plants in the context of South Korean urbanisation and redevelopment. Once sacred trees are covered by the urbanisation, only faint traces of the past communities remain. The group explores the way people and ecology are connected, through the historical migrations that have taken place. Their work addresses plants, but even more so the Gyeongsang and Gyeonggi Provinces’ residents and migrant workers who remain unsettled in unstable conditions.
Oswaldo Maciá’s selection of drawings and frescoes depict the destruction caused by global warming within our climate emergency. The alarming Amazon rainforest fires and typhoons are immortalised in his frescoes, Amazonia (2022) and Typhoon (2022). The artist will also present an acoustic work responding to time, place and the ever-changing nature of our planet.
Maciá’s oeuvre questions the awareness proportioned by the senses and the relations that are established between humans and the planet. His work also focuses on migration and cross pollination, stimulating questions about how we find our place in the world and notions of belonging. The artist’s olfactory-acoustic sculptures have been exhibited worldwide, creating immersive scenarios.
Uriel Orlow explores the mountain ecosystems which present an interesting contradiction: the climate is warming at a higher pace than the global average, yet the vegetation response is slower than might be expected. However, the plants, often thought of as unmoving, are shifting their habitat ranges in order to follow the conditions they are adapted to.
Himalayan Drift (2022) – which will be exhibited as part of É a lama, é a lama – was created by Orlow using satellite images of the Himalaya Mountain range. These images indicate temperature shifts by focusing on vegetation.
É a lama, é a lama will also feature a large wall piece by Orlow compromised of multiple coloured monochrome prints, each varying in colour to represent the yearly temperature of the Himalayas from 1900 to 2020. This works conveys the progressive heating of our planet based on the climate stripes developed by Ed Hawkins at the University of Reading.
The artist’s practice is research-driven, process-oriented and often in dialogue with other disciplines and people. His projects engage with residues of colonialism; spatial manifestations of memory; social and ecological justice; blind spots of representation and plants. His multi-media installations focus on specific locations and micro-histories. Working across installation, photography, film, drawing, and sound his works bring different image-regimes and narrative modes into correspondence.
É a lama, é a lama is curated by Maria do Carmo M. P. de Pontes.
Information provided by the artists and their respective representing galleries.
Notes to Editors
Maria Thereza Alves, born in 1961 in São Paulo, Brazil. Lives and works in Europe.
Maria Thereza Alves has a B.F.A from the Cooper Union School of Art and is co-founder of the Partido Verde, PV, Brazil (The Green Party, Brazil).
Alves’ work is in the collections of Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; INELCOM Collection, Madrid; Migros Museum, Zurich, Switzerland; Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris, France; Collection vidéo Seine-Saint-Denis, Paris; IAC — Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne, France; BPS22 – Musée d’art de la Province de Hainaut, Charleroi, Belgium; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada; and the collection of Heather & Anthony Podesta, Washington D.C., USA.
Solo exhibitions include those at the Fondazione Morra Greco, Naples, Italy; The CAAC (Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo), Seville, Spain; and Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons School of Design, New York, USA. Alves received the New School’s 2016-2018 Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics.
Alves has participated in the 13th and 15th documenta, Kassel, Germany; the 8th Berlin Biennale; Manifesta 12 in Palermo and 7 in Trento; the 6th Moscow Biennale; the X Lyon Biennale; the Prague Biennale; the Edge Biennale, Madrid and London; the 22nd Sydney Biennale; the 1st Toronto Biennale; the 2nd Bienal de La Habana; 22nd Biennale Panamericana di Quito; São Paulo Biennale in 2016 and 2010; 13th Sharjah Biennial; the Taipei Biennale; the 3rd Guangzhou Triennale; and 2nd Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial.
In 1981, Alves was the representative to the U.S. for the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’s Party) of Brazil. In 1979, while a member of the International Indian Treaty Council, based in New York, Alves made an official presentation on the human rights abuses of the indigenous population of Brazil at the U.N. Human Rights Conference in Geneva. In 2012, José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Union, asked Alves to be part of his special committee to formulate a New Narrative for Europe which was publicly presented in Venice.
Tapfuma Gutsa, born in 1956, Harare, Zimbabwe. Lives and works in Murehwa, Zimbabwe.
Tapfuma Gutsa studied art at the Driefontein Mission School in Zimbabwe, and later became the first Zimbabwean recipient of a British Council award, studying at the City and Guilds School of Art, London from 1982-1985. Returning to Zimbabwe, he organised, in 1988, the first of a series of Pachipamwe workshops before establishing the Surprise studios in 1997. In 2011, Gutsa showed in the Zimbabwean Pavilion of the 54th Venice Biennale. Solo shows include those at National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, Zimbabwe; First Floor Gallery Harare; October Gallery, London; Reece Gallery, New York, USA; and Galerie der Freischaffenden, Vienna, Austria. Group exhibitions include those at Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Yorkshire, UK; and Gallery Dieleman, Chateau de Petit Leez, Gembloux, Belgium as well as the Dakar Biennale and Johannesburg Biennale.
In 2005, his residency at Gasworks, London, coincided with Africa Remix at the Hayward Gallery. In 1990 he participated in the seminal exhibition African Artists: Changing Traditions at the Studio Museum, Harlem. Gutsa served as Deputy Director of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe.
In recent years, Gutsa has returned to his ancestral home in Murehwa where he is using his land for a major new project – a sustainable artist residency. This residency, as well as both housing artists and supporting their studio practice, will also involve artists in traditional farming practices. This self-sufficient immersive environment aims to encourage those that reside there to reconnect with the land and in practice and in spirit.
ikkibawiKrrr is a South Korean visual research band founded in 2021 that explores multifaceted links between plants and humanity; civilisation and natural phenomena; and colonialism and ecology. Its current members are KO Gyeol, KIM Jungwon, and CHO Jieun. The name of the group is a neologism comprised of: ikki (moss), bawi (rock) and krr, an onomatopoeic Korean word that indicates a rolling motion. The group aims to be ‘moss-like’ in its practice: initially small but progressively spreading to the surrounding environment and continually expanding its boundaries. IkkibawiKrrr prefers to be referred to as a ‘visual research band’ rather than an ‘art collective’, explaining that their practice is closer to that of a band, playing music together.
Although only founded in 2021, ikkibawiKrrr had an earlier iteration in Mixrice – a well-established artist collective that likewise investigated ecology, community and questions of diasporic existence, focusing on contemporary immigration issues.
Their work has been exhibited at Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, Gwacheon, South Korea; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art; Seoul, South Korea; Seoul City Museum, Seoul. They have exhibited at international biennales including Documenta, Kassel, Germany and the Venice Biennale.
In 2016, the group received the Korea Artist Prize awarded by National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul. They were also awarded the Young Artists Prize by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism Republic of Korea.
Oswaldo Maciá, born in 1960, Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. Lives and works in London, UK, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.
In 1976 Oswaldo Maciá attended the School of Fine Arts in Cartagena at the age of 16, graduating in 1980. In 1982 he moved to Bogotá to study advertising at Jorge Tadeo Lozano University, and left after five semesters to become a full-time artist. Maciá taught Fine Art at Jorge Tadeo Lozano University from 1985 before moving to Barcelona in 1989, where he studied Mural Painting at Llotja School of Fine Art.
In 1990 Maciá moved to London, where he continues to run a studio. He studied BA Sculpture between 1990 and 1993 at Guildhall University, followed in 1994 by Masters in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Oswaldo Maciá work is held in international art collections including the Tate’s permanent collection. His work has been exhibited globally, including at Tate Modern, London, UK; Tate Britain, London; Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, UK; Daros Latinamerica, Zurich, Switzerland; Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland; MOCO Montpellier Contemporain, Montpellier, France; Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen, Germany; Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, Spain; Museum Anna Nordlander/MAN, Skellefteå, Sweden; Site Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA; and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, Australia.
Maciá won the Golden Pear at the 2018 Art & Olfaction Awards for his experimental work with scent. In 2015 was awarded a public commission for the city of Bogotá, creating the first public sound sculpture in the southern hemisphere. In 2011 Maciá received the prestigious first prize at the 2011 Bienal de Cuenca, Ecuador. His work has been exhibited in biennales around the world including Manifesta 9, Genk, Belgium as well as the Venice Biennale, Riga Biennial and Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Uriel Orlow, born in 1973, Zurich, Switzerland. Lives and works between Lisbon, London and Zurich.
Uriel Orlow studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design London; the University of Geneva; the Slade School of Art (University College London) and UAL, completing a PhD in Fine Art in 2002.
The artist is the recipient of the 2023 Swiss Grand Prix for Art / Prix Meret Oppenheim. In 2020 he received the C. F. Meyer Prize and in 2017 he was awarded the Sharjah Biennial prize. He also received a ‘Werkjahr’ award from the City of Zurich in 2015 and three Swiss Art Awards at Art Basel (2008, 2009, 2012) and was shortlisted for the Jarman award in 2013. Orlow has taught at art colleges internationally including Royal College of Art, London; Goldsmiths University of London; Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London and HEAD – University of the Arts Geneva. He is currently reader (associate professor/ senior researcher) at University of Westminster, London and docent at ZHdK, the University of the Arts, Zurich.
Orlow’s work has been exhibited in numerous museums globally including: Tate, London, UK; Courtauld Institute, London; ICA, London; Gasworks, London; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, Kunsthalle Budapest, Budapest, Hungary; South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa; and Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, Chicago, USA. His work has also been exhibited at the Berlin Biennale; Venice Biennale; Vienna Biennale and Manifesta 9 & 12 in Genk and Palermo.
Elizabeth Xi Bauer presents É a lama, é a lama which will run from 4th August – 16th September 2023, open Wednesday through to Saturday, 12 – 6 pm or by appointment. A Private View will be held on 3rd August 2023, 6 – 8 pm in the presence of artists. Artists will be available for interviews.
