Groundwork is a two-project exhibition where the razing of the earth is examined as a cycle
of social and political collapse and regeneration. Rendering powerful entanglements
between land, labour and extractivist practices endemic in South America and the Middle
East, the exhibition poses the natural landscape as a foundation which is shaped and
misshaped by history.
Shadi Haroumi’s I Dream the Mountain is Still Whole (2017) is a video installation filmed in a
quarry in the mountains of Kurdistan. The work weaves a story of political dissidence
interwoven with the realities of hard labor and the extractive practices that are slowly
harvesting, and thereby erasing, a force as mighty as a mountain. The artist longs for the
time when the mountain was still whole, drawing a metaphor between the erasure of this
natural monument and the erasure of histories it contains.
Yano-a (2005) is a video installation by Brazilian artists Claudia Andujar, Leandro Lima and
Gisela Motta that examines extractivist industries, environmental devastation, and the
resulting inequities endured by Amazonian indigenous communities in the region. Evoking
the glare of fire, this installation projects an iconic photograph of a burning Yanomami
maloca (hut), taken by Andujar in 1976, overlaid in an activation by Lima and Motta with a
red filter, water and an animation of flames.

VIDEOS:

I Dream the Mountain is Still Whole:
https://vimeo.com/209723632/72fc129a35

YANO-A:
https://vimeo.com/97986357