Artists

Nils Alix-Tabeling, Fungai Benhura, Emma Fineman, Gabriella Hirst, Simone Griffin, Dora Jeridi, Reika Takebayashi, Masaomi Yasunaga, Rafał Zajko

Press release

Public Gallery is pleased to present _Neck of the wood_, a group exhibition of works by nine artists whose practices are rooted in folkloric tradition, ecofeminism, archaeological aesthetics, decolonial and queer theory. Across painting, sculpture, and living installation, this exhibition attends to the many meanings of ecology, demonstrating the capacity of ecocritical frameworks to examine the geographical, socioeconomic and cultural extractions and exclusions engendered by capitalist and colonial power structures. Questioning the meaning of ‘territories’, as it relates to the body, nation states, and the rapid erasure of collective commons, _Neck of the wood_ encourages a reimagination of our present world and offers frameworks for countercultural thinking. The climate crisis, as Amitav Ghosh writes, “is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination”. As rising tides and wildfires consume cities and the earth’s surface bears scars from nuclear warfare and extractive violence, these artists offer a counter-narrative – one that acknowledges destruction but refuses despair. Presenting the body as both vulnerable and resilient, the land as both wounded and sovereign, and the future as something still to be made, _Neck of the wood_ invites us to consider our own entanglements in these histories and systems. In the face of collapse, what forms of care, stewardship, and resistance can we cultivate, to plant and persist?