all the forest stands with you traces the entangled relationalities between the human and the more-than-human world. The exhibition brings together artists whose practices connect to a place where whenua, water, air, and ancestral presence are not easily reduced to backdrop or resource, but remain active participants in shared worlds. Taking this condition not as an illustration, but as a proposition: to revisit, reevaluate, and reimagine the status quo of our being in a world that is never solely human.

At a certain historical juncture, a division between the natural and the cultural sphere became central to European patriarchal projects of power and domination. Circulated and entrenched around the world through colonial expansion, this split reshaped landscapes, laws, and bodies, establishing “nature” – and humans – as object, property, and extractable matter. The effects of this division persist. Past and ongoing extractivist violences, as well as escalating climate emergencies and environmental injustices, speak to the endurance of a binary logic in which humans –some humans – position themselves against a world rendered inert. Yet other modes of relationality have always existed and endured, in traditional knowledges, spirituality and artistic imaginaries: ways of understanding land and nature as living, as kin, as relation. Relating in ways of living that bind responsibility to reciprocity.

all the forest stands with you takes its title from a line by US-American poet, philosopher, essayist, and playwright Susan Griffin. While Griffin’s early ecofeminist position is rightfully criticized for leaning towards essentialism, equating woman with nature, she radically argued in her time (and within a capitalist society saturated by enlightenment division) for an understanding that shreds colonial and patriarchal forms of relationality to and in an entangled world. “This is the paradox of vision,” she wrote elsewhere, “Sharp perception softens our existence in the world.” The exhibition adopts this paradox as method: to look closely at structures of domination, and at the same time relating with love to more-than-human agency.

Structured around three perspectives – on power, love, and agency – the exhibition moves between critique and speculation. It asks what it means to inhabit an ongoing rupture without reproducing it, and how practices of attention might reconfigure our sense of agency, accountability, and coexistence. If our relationship with the world has often been imbalanced, all the forest stands with you invites a different stance: one in which perception becomes relation, and relation becomes a shared ground for living otherwise.

Curated by Anja Lückenkemper

Image Credit: Ayesha Green: Soil from Papa (Diptych), 2018. Courtesy: Erika Chamberlain and Josh Williams.