THE EXHIBITION

“Emergent/cy” features artistic works centering on plants and plant life in relation to the currently popular issues in environmental ethics and vegetal ecologies, broadly pertaining to the reframing of the term “climate change” into “climate emergency” and “climate crisis.” This change illustrates the outcomes of the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit discussions, which proposed the revision in the mainstream ways of thinking of the catastrophic changes resulting from people’s unlimited extraction of Earth’s natural resources. This pessimistic realization—that human civilization will likely end due to its own action—informs Anthropocene studies, which recognizes the overall human failure to provide environmental sustainability due to the over-reliance on fossil fuels whose burning brings about catastrophically high levels of greenhouse gas emissions. A significant area of interest related to Anthropocene studies is plants and plant life, which underlie several relatively new and emerging fields of research, such as environmental humanities, critical plant studies, human geography, and political ecology, to name just a few. These fields propose useful analytical frameworks of understanding the multi-layered relationship between humans and plants, also in the contexts of individual nation-state policies for plant cultivation, framed as a vital element of national heritage missions. One outcome of this interest in the diverse agency of plants is a critical reframing of the conventionally Western way of thinking of plants as a non-sentient, passive, and therefore “lower” forms of being. In this way, plants are thought of not merely as ornaments or as metaphors that describe aspects of human life, but, increasingly, as entities that people themselves can learn from, as organisms whose agency far exceeds what is conventionally imagined as their subservient function in human life. We recognize this shift as a red thread that runs across the exhibition’s artworks and artistic practices, which demonstrate the artists’ diverse forms of relationality with plants, while reflecting on their agency in specifically situated (time, place) contexts.

A theme that recurs through some of the exhibition’s works is the use of specific plants as symbols of nation-state identities and belongings. The protagonist of Celia Irina González’s work is the banana, a symbol of Cuban national identity; the artist traces the process of banana pruning, used by Cuban agricultural workers to accelerate the plant’s growth, and reflects, through it, on the violent socializing processes employed in Cuban re-education centers for children and adolescents. Kenneth Constance Loe focuses on Bua Cek, a critically endangered species of fern in Singapore, which, grows exclusively in the training areas of the Singapore Armed Forces, which are restricted from public access; Loe presents the fern as a silent witness to the processes involved in mandatory military service, which submits civilian bodies to disciplinary regimes. Przemek Branas’ work references the late 19th-century excavation findings of early human fossils, which destabilized the strict division between humans and animals; his composition, a hybrid beast-like entity that combines elements of human, animal, and plant worlds, results from his daily practice of collecting and drying local plants, which he uses as material for collage compositions, objects, and installation. Luiza Prado examines body and territory as sites of value extraction within digital economies, engaging with digital image-making practices—the exchange of nude selfies—and digital literary form—sexting—to explore connections between the extinction of an aphrodisiac plant, silphium, and the end to a love affair. The seed of this plant was shaped like a heart, and is thought to be the origin of the heart shape in Western iconography. Also taking on the theme of extinction, Liljana Mead Martin presents works from two series: “Primary Futures” (2025) reflects on the evolving state of Canada’s primary forests, focusing on the Western Red Cedar—an ancient host to countless species and a vital carbon store; “Deep Thirst BioOrchestra” envisions a post-fire ecosystem where hybrid human-plant forms emerge as the first signs of regeneration by imagining speculative flora that blends human limbs with mycelial and carnivorous plant structures.

THE ARTISTS

Celia Irina González, Havana, 1985, lives and works in Mexico City. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, and a Masters in Visual Anthropology from FLACSO, Ecuador. She has participated in the exhibitions "Arco Madrid", Ángeles Baños Gallery; "Arte Latinoamericano, Colección MEIAC", Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo, Badajoz, Spain; "Sin Authorización: Contemporary Cuban Art", Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, NY; "Ojos de hueso", Angeles Baños Gallery, Spain; "Esok" Jakarta Biennial, Indonesia; "Kochi-Muziris Biennial", Kerala, India; "Delikado Peligroso", Matadero, Madrid; Cuban Pavilion, Venice Biennial; "Rendez-Vous", Lyon Biennial, France. She has received the Botín Foundation Grant for Visual Arts, Santander, Spain and the Grants & Commissions Program, The Cisnero Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), Miami. She has been in residence at Reinbeckhallen Residency Program, Berlin; "El Ranchito Residency", Matadero Center, Madrid in collaboration with Artista x Artista Residency, Havana, Cuba; Residency Program of the Federal Ministry for Education, Art and Culture in collaboration with KulturKontakt, Vienna, Austria; Skills Biennial, Gray's School of Art, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen City, Scotland. She has published the essays "Volcanic Lakes and Hallucinatory Vegetation. Disaster to Think about the Future" in Global Manifestos for the Twenty-First Century. Rethinking Culture, Common Struggles, and Future Change, UK: Routledge; "No somos memorias: curar el miedo," Horizontes Antropológicos, 29 (67), Sep-Dec; Futuro cósmico: certificado, garantizado: Celia-Yunior in conversation with Carlos Aguilera, Queretaro: Rialta; "Tarde de Sándwiches: The failure of participation in contemporary Cuban art" in The Failures of Public Art and Participation, Oxford: Routledge; "Entrar en la lluvia" in No Country Magazine, Queretaro: Rialta.

Kenneth Constance Loe (he/they) is an artist, writer, performer, and proofreader from Singapore, and currently based in Vienna, Austria. They are a co-founder of Monzoom.xyz, an online platform for emergent art practices and alternative education co-organised with Weixin Quek Chong, and soft/WALL/studs, a former collaborative project in Singapore involving several artists, writers, filmmakers, art workers, and researchers. They are also a collaborator of Holiday Poets Society, a Vienna-based poetry collective, together with Ari Ban and Claire Lefèvre. His practice revolves around material and sensorial fetishes of desire, poetics of hospitality, body memory, queer ecologies, and other tangential thoughts through a performative collocation of sculpture, video, movement, text, and olfactory objects. They have presented their work in Vienna, Sofia, Yogyakarta, Tallinn, New York, Brussels, and Auckland among other cities. They have performed in venues and festivals such as brut Wien, Kultursommer Wien, VORBRENNER, steirischer herbst, Tanzquartier Wien, Belvedere 21, WUK, Wienwoche, and Kristianstads konsthall, as well as held residencies at Akademie Schloss Solitude (Web Residency »Algorithmic Poetry«), Raw Matters Vienna, and Dance Nucleus Singapore. Their diploma project Bua Cek / 破傘蕨  was shortlisted for the Kunsthalle Wien Prize 2024 and their poetry manuscript sun-dried air was a finalist of the 2022 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize. Their poetry has recently been published in rivulet 10: sound barrier and the anthology New Singapore Poetries (Gaudy Boy, 2022). 

Kenneth Constance Loe (he/they) is an artist, writer, performer, and proofreader from Singapore, and currently based in Vienna, Austria. His practice revolves around material and sensorial fetishes of desire, poetics of hospitality, body memory, queer ecologies, and other tangential thoughts through a performative collocation of sculpture, video, movement, text, and olfactory objects.

Przemek Branas (born 1987, lives and works in Portugal) – author of performances, videos and installations. He graduated from the Faculty of Intermedia at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, he defended his doctorate in 2018 at the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Studies of the University of Arts in Poznań. In his works, he combines biographical threads with symbols. He is interested in crossing the barriers set by the body and culture and mechanisms of social functioning. He participated, among others, at the Embodied Action festival in Hong Kong (2016), GUYU ACTION Performance Art Festival in Xi’an (China, 2016), Polish Performance Night, Le Lieu Gallery in Quebec (2014). He won the 2nd prize in the Spojrzenia Dutch Bank 2017 competition. In 2015, he was the winner of the Gray House Foundation’s Szara Kamienica award. He was a resident of Meet Factory in Prague (2016), Sesama in Jakarta (2017) and Terra Foudation for American Art in Giverny (2017). The works are in the private and public collections in Poland, such as: Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Galeria Labirynt in Lublin, Tatra Museum in Zakopane, Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź, Galeria Arsenał in Poznań, Gdańsk City Gallery,Nomus, Gdańsk.

Luiza Prado De O. Martins  is an artist, writer and scholar. Her work moves between installation and herbalist practices, using performance and ritual as a way of invitation and activation for audiences. Her practice explores relations and knowledge between plants, political infrastructures, and technology, and questions what structures and processes are needed for collective concerns of environmental care and reproductive justice. She holds a PhD from the University of the Arts Berlin, and an MA from the University of the Arts Bremen. Her ongoing artistic research project, “Un/Earthings and Moon Landings” narrates, through a series of artworks, the extinction and later reappearance of an ancient contraceptive, aphrodisiac and spice called silphium. She has exhibited and performed work at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg (MUDAM), the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Museum Ostwall (Dortmund), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum (Cologne), the National Museum of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Savvy Contemporary, Arebyte Gallery, Akademie Schloss Solitude, and Kampnagel, among others. She is currently based in Berlin.

Liljana Mead Martin is an artist and environmental researcher based in Vancouver, Canada. Her practice engages with the tactile remnants of altered landscapes—charred wood, demolition dust, soil and the regenerative processes that follow—to explore themes of adaptation, death, and renewal. Through sculpture and mixed media, her work reflects on the temporal rhythms of ecological balance and the existential questions embedded in climate change. By incorporating sculptural casts of her own form, filled with fluorescent bioplastics, her work evokes references to deep time and temperature change, creating a visceral connection between the material realities of land degradation and the embodied experience of climate crisis. Martin holds a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design ('10) and an MFA from Emily Carr University ('16). Her work has been exhibited at The Klondike Institute for Arts and Culture (YT), Nanaimo Art Gallery (BC), and Wil Aballe Art Projects (BC), NADA (NYC,) and Zalucky Contemporary (TO), among others. She is the Editor of BIOMASS, an online publication for dialogues around sustainable art practices, and a member of the Hummingbird Collective, a group who creates educational materials that support environmental literacy through art. She works as a Science Communicator with conservation groups and organizations in the Salish Sea (Pacific Northwest), where she translates environmental research into visual communications for improved environmental policy.