Every Leaf Is an Eye - new exhibition at Göteborgs Konsthall

Opening: Saturday the 7^th December, 1-5 pm

Press preview: Friday the 6^th December, 9.30 am

Participating artists: Otobong Nkanga (Nigeria/Belgium), Isuma (Canada), Anders Sunna (Sweden) & Michiel Brouwer (Sweden/the Netherlands) and Simon Gush (South Africa).

Across the world local communities are displaced in conflicts about the right to forests, agricultural land, minerals and watercourses. In the group exhibition Every Leaf Is an Eye at Göteborgs Konsthall, four artists and collectives present their different perspectives on the relationship between politics, land, ecology and human rights.

In engaging with how communities, memories, cultures and lives are impacted by the ravages of exploitation, Every Leaf Is an Eye positions contemporary art in relation to collective activism, highlighting the politics of power, violence and justice.

The exhibition Every Leaf Is an Eye lends its name from a collection of political articles by the late Swedish author Sara Lidman, and is inspired by its poetic and intimate portrayal of the relationship between local and global freedom struggles.

Multi-disciplinary artist Otobong Nkanga, recently named the inaugural winner of the prestigious Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award Programme, presents sculptural work and textiles that examine the violence to nature in countries such as Nigeria and Namibia. The work sheds light on how major industries deplete the land through the excavation of precious and rare minerals, which are subsequently transformed into desirable consumer goods for Western consumption.

In artists Anders Sunna and Michiel Brouwer’s collaborative work, the mining industry and the ruthless exploitation of the landscape in Sápmi, the Sami people and their history, are at the centre of an extensive site-specific installation of paintings, murals, photographs and sculpture.

The Inuit film collective Isuma, who represented Canada at the2019 Venice Biennale, presents the film One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk, that speaks of the historic trauma of forced relocation of families from an Inuit point of view. The film captures a scene where oppression and resistance meet in a single dialogue, in a seemingly local event with far-reaching and violent implications for Inuit life and culture.

Using both a poetic and documentary film language Simon Gush presents a video trilogy exploring his own family’s participation in the colonial disposession of land, the relationship between land and work as well as the legal land claim process now taking place in the area.