PROGRAM

INTRODUCTION

An introduction will be held by the Fotogalleriet’s Head of Exhibitions and Curator Miki Gebrelul welcoming participants and audience.

SCREENING: WILD RELATIVES

Film screening of Jumana Manna’s Wild Relatives (66 minutes, 2018).

In 2012, an international agricultural research center was forced to relocate from Aleppo, Syria, to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon due to the Syrian Revolution turned war. Having left behind its seed bank, the research center began laboriously planting its seed collection from back-ups stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land, and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Through sculpture, filmmaking, and occasional writing, Manna deals with the paradoxes of preservation practices, particularly within the fields of architecture, agriculture and law. Her practice considers the tension between the modernist traditions of categorization and conservation and the unruliness of ruination, life and its regeneration. Jumana was raised in Jerusalem and lives in Berlin.

CONVERSATION

After the screening there will be a conversation between writer and Arabic cultural historian Rana Issa and Miki Gebrelul.

Rana Issa is a writer, translator and cultural producer focusing on literary and contemporary artistic practices entangled with Arabic cultural history. She works at the intersection between public humanities, activist engagements, and academic curiosity. Rana’s work has appeared in leading journals, platforms and presses, and she has collaborations with international artists from the region in the fields of film, performance arts, visual arts and sculpture. Her book The Modern Arabic Bible was published this year from Edinburgh University Press.

DJ-SET AND PIZZA

The film screening will be followed by an informal gathering and a DJ-set with Sámi electronic musician Peder Niilas Tårnesvik. The terrace at Kunstnernes Hus will be open, and pizza will be served from 19:00.

Composer, artist and sound artist Peder Niilas Tårnesvik works widely across genres and expressions, but always has a common thread through his works. Through his project Niilas, he has won the Spellemann Prize for his debut album Also This Will Change (2020) with club music, held performances with stones and electronics, and maintained a continuous flow as a rock-solid DJ. By weaving electronic beats, deep bass and melancholic melodies, he creates glittering carpets of sound, which are bound together by his Sami origins and Arctic aesthetics.

Seeds Shall Set Us Free, an exhibition by Munem Wasif, investigates food systems, wild and uncultivated seeds, and plants that have a more holistic relation to people and bodies, especially connected to oral histories and Indigenous knowledge. We gather around a series of interdisciplinary programs in connection with the exhibition, which is currently open in Oslo. Departing from artistic and curatorial methodologies, we move across the fluidity of learning and exchange to evoke ecologies of survival, sustenance, and ritualization of collectivity, where seeds play a significant role in repositioning our historical time.

Modernity and progress pushed the boundaries of the cultivable but also broke relations of seasons and ritualistic gathering in favor of mass production and loss of regard to the land and livelihood. We focus specifically on the relationship between Asia and the Arctic and draw from Indigenous knowledge to look at how agriculture has attempted to serve exploitative practices of land grabbing when we look, for instance, at the Sámi people and their livelihood in the Arctic territory and the Garo people in Bangladesh. From music, foraging edible plants, using and abusing fertilizers for military use first, and the toxication of land later, we reclaim a different relation to nature and the body. This allows us to reorient technology, social value, and the world from an artistic perspective and challenge notions of universality and modernity from within and outside the exhibition space, and its sphere of influence beyond its framing of Modernity’s promise of bettering living conditions while bringing with itself a flattening of experience and impoverishment of nutrients.

Wild Plants: The Unplanted and the Uncultivated, a Series of Gatherings brings together practitioners from different fields in Oslo over different days and weeks to explore the potential of changing our relation to food and seeds and find new ways and relations between humans and more-than-human beings.

The programs depart from Seeds Shall Set Us Free, a solo exhibition by Munem Wasif. The exhibition and its related events have received funding from Arts Council Norway and The Gwaertler Grant.

Rike Frank works as a curator and writer and teaches exhibition histories and curatorial practice. She is Executive Director of the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme, as well as co-director of the European Kunsthalle.

Antonio Cataldo, PhD, is a curator, a scholar, and, since August 2018, the Artistic Director of Fotogalleriet in Oslo. He currently also chairs the Association of Norwegian Kunsthalles.

Miki Gebrelul is a Curator and Head of Exhibitions at Fotogalleriet. Gebrelul is a recent graduate with MA in Gender Studies and Philosophy from University of Oslo, focusing on queer individuals and groups with minority ethnic backgrounds.