In this artist talk, Corinne Silva will discuss recent works including site-specific photographic installation Imported Landscapes (2010) in which she explores the effect of human activity on land, geographic and political borders, migration and ecology. Made in Israel/Palestine, her photographic and sound installations in Garden State (2014) explore Israeli suburban gardens in the West Bank and Israeli-planted forests. Through these works Silva will consider photography and representation, along with possible visual languages and artistic strategies to activate agency in the viewer.
Most recently, in collaborative work with Eva Sajovic, Silva has used photography, installation and performance to further explore the politics of planting. In One Thousand Flowers From A Test Tube (198 Contemporary Arts & Learning, 2015), the artists filled the gallery with one thousand mass-produced plants, and nurtured them alongside cuttings from Silva’s grandmother’s geraniums to consider the politics of plant cultivation. Performances Eating the Bones (2015/16) and Counting (2016) continue to question perceived human/plant hierarchies.
Corinne Silva’s practice is concerned with landscape as a complex interrelation of culture and geography, politics and botany, living beings and inanimate matter. The artist explores these interrelations through a direct and immediate engagement with the territories she visits, on journeys through Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
Corinne Silva is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Photography and the Archive Research Centre, University of the Arts London. Recent group and solo exhibitions include ffotogallery, Cardiff (2015; The Mosaic Rooms, London (2015); Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, (2015); Kunstbezirk, Stuttgart, (2013).