Both urgent and poignant works explore the entanglements between people, land and the natural world. Against the unfolding crises of our times – escalating fascisms, global warming, forced migration, genocide – they invite us to look and listen carefully to stories of displacement and belonging, resisting the erasure and dehumanisation of diasporic communities.
Henna Asikainen has worked with landscape architect Usue Ruiz Arana and composer Ben Ponton to develop a new sound work that emerges in the gallery admits a forest of birds’ nests and foraged materials. Taking its name from Finnish folklore, Lintukoto is a mythical warm, safe, haven at the far edges of the world, where the sky meets earth, and birds were thought to migrate to for winter.
The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing is a tender film essay by Theo Panagopoulos, a Palestinian filmmaker based in Scotland. When Panagopoulos unearthed a rarely seen Scottish film archive of Palestinian wildflowers, he decided to reclaim the footage. This film-essay questions the role of image-making as a tool for both testimony and violence when rooted to the entanglements between people and the land.
