Green Snake: women-centred ecologies

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Tai Kwun Contemporary is proud to present Green Snake: women-centred ecologies, a group exhibition pointing to the extractive economies at the root of our ecological crises, which treat nature as reserves of resources for exploitation. The exhibition asks what alternative narratives are activated through artists’ visions that celebrate nature as an all-encompassing and generative force — many of them grounded in notions of care and interrelationship that are central to ecofeminism. The labour of care is essential to the reproduction of existence: this has been undervalued in articulated patriarchal and imperial systems across broad geographies. Green Snake presents works by artists drawing on and revitalising diverse cosmological systems in relation to ecology and women-centred knowledge.

On view from 20 December 2023 to 1 April 2024 and curated by Kathryn Weir and Xue Tan, with assistant curators Tiffany Leung and Pietro Scammacca, Green Snake: women-centred ecologies gathers more than 30 artists and collectives from 20 countries, presenting over 60 works of which 16 are new productions specially commissioned for the exhibition.

The exhibition title refers both to the celebrated ancient Chinese folktale about two demon sisters, White Snake and Green Snake, and to mythological serpentine figures across cultures that are associated with nature’s capacity to shed skins, transform and re-awaken. In the eighth-century folktale Madame White Snake, the sister figure of Green Snake strongly represents women’s agency, sisterhood and also gender fluidity — and has been widely reinterpreted in contemporary literature and cinema. At another level, in the exhibition, the snake’s sinuous curves echo the geomorphology of river systems and the vital energy of the water flowing through them. A series of artists in the exhibition have longstanding research interests in specific river ecosystems and in their associated mythologies. Dialogues between works rooted in different geographies testify to parallel struggles and to parallel practices of empathy and care for non-human existence. The figure of an all-encompassing circle of planetary and cosmic renewal emerges in a symphonic call for a radical reorientation of the human within the whole.

Artists: AFSAR (Asian Feminist Studio for Art and Research), Yussef Agbo-Ola & Tabita Rezaire, Maria Thereza Alves, Lhola Amira, Minia Biabiany, Adriana Bustos, Seba Calfuqueo, Cao Minghao & Chen Jianjun, Carolina Caycedo, Stephanie Comilang & Simon Speiser, Valentina Desideri & Denise Ferreira da Silva, Rohini Devasher, Gidree Bawlee, Guo Fengyi, Manjot Kaur, Jaffa Lam, Candice Lin, Lavanya Mani, Marzia Migliora, Ann Leda Shapiro, Karan Shrestha, Dima Srouji, Natasha Tontey, Cecilia Vicuña, Tricky Walsh, Dana Whabira

Curated by Kathryn Weir​ and Xue Tan, with assistant curators Tiffany Leung and Pietro Scammacca