by Nicole Zihua Zhang (張梓華)
‘RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology’ at London’s Barbican Art Gallery brings together photography, moving images and installation works by nearly 50 female and transgender artists from different generations, geographical locations and aesthetic strategies. The exhibition focuses on gender and ecological perspectives, exploring the systematic connection between female oppression and the ecological crisis, with a ‘resistance spirit’ as its underlying theme: the exhibition deals with deprivation, creative acts of resistance, the labour of ecological care, the entangled relationship between the body and the land, environmental racism and exclusion, and queerness and mobility in the face of rigid social structures and hierarchies. It is also an exhibition about the ecological urgency of a time of global crisis, proposing a path of diverse, inclusive and decolonial ecofeminism. Through six thematic units, it presents around 250 piercing, rebellious and radical works, weaving a possibility that exists within the female subject that is not limited by sexualisation, dualism or capitalist structures. At the same time, it explores activism as an artistic strategy and points to the intertwining of struggles for social and environmental justice.
The broad contours of ecofeminism in Europe and North America were already taking shape in the 1960s, shaped by people like Rachel Carson, with the intention of constructing a view of nature as an interdependent biological network with humans,1 writes curator Alona Pardo in the exhibition’s publication. At the same time, the creativity of ecofeminist artists has pushed art into new territories, thanks to the development of conceptual art, spiritual feminism, and the practical reality of women being excluded from the art market, which has pushed them far beyond the limits of painting and traditional gallery displays.2 After more than 50 years of evolution, and as the impact of ecological destruction on the survival of the planet rises to the forefront of the political agenda, the intersection of gender and climate justice becomes clearly visible. A new, decolonised ecofeminism is reviving, one that gradually embraces anti-racism, anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, and pro-queer, connecting the intersectional analysis of gender, ecology, race, speciesism and national issues to compensate for the blind spots of early ecofeminists. The ‘RE/SISTERS’ has an ambitious curatorial position. It examines the development of ecofeminism and attempts to comprehensively and systematically showcase a rich sample of the creative achievements of this school of thought.
Resistance to the economic logic of capitalism through activism, allegorical performances and ritual behaviour
At the entrance to the exhibition, the photographic work Untitled (We Won’t Play Our Nature to Your Culture) (1983) is juxtaposed with the exhibition title. This image, created by the early feminist Barbara Kruger, shows a woman covering her eyes with leaves, with the slogan ‘We Won’t Play Our Nature to Your Culture’ superimposed in capital English letters, warning people to awaken and resist. It seems to be the artistic strategy adopted by curator Alona Pardoe to set the tone of the exhibition: This work shows us a third possibility, a new way of being in the feminist body, free from the shackles of male cultural imperialism, while embracing an inextricable connection to our ecological community. A world defined not by the oppression, strangulation and domination of marginalised groups (including women, marginalised bodies and gender non-normative individuals, as well as all other life forms), but also free from the tyranny of the nuclear-military-industrial complex, whose prosperity and continued rule relies on the politics of exploitation through the oppression and violence of women.3
Over the past century, rivers, forests, deserts and other natural environments have been subjected to multiple forms of exploitation, domestication, removal and pollution on a global scale. Rural, coastal and indigenous communities close to mining industries have suffered far more negative impacts than other places, which raises the issue of ecological justice. The exhibition begins with works that expose environmental tragedies in multiple regions. Otobong Nkanga’s Tsumeb Fragments (2015) consists of six individual display units, each using a different medium to convey how the development of Namibia’s (South Africa) most famous mining region has shaped both the environment itself and the lives of those living near the resource extraction, as well as the hierarchy of the mining economy. The mineral raw materials themselves are at the centre, while the surrounding units of work allow us to read and view the history that reveals how the earth is transformed into raw materials. The critical gesture of linking the extraction of natural resources with the economic and political schemes that make this violent structure of dispossession possible has become a staple of decolonial criticism. In her newspaper collage series Speaking of Mud (2019), Mabe Bethonico removes the text, leaving only the images of the Brazilian countryside devastated by mining, tragedies that stem from corporate and government negligence. Similarly, in her three-channel video ‘Habitat’ (2017), Taloi Havini sees capitalism as an extension of colonialism, exploring the devastating impact of the Panguna copper mine on indigenous communities. She explains that the colonisation of indigenous women led to a cultural breakdown and weakened the matrilineal system whereby property and land were passed down through women.
Facing the sudden changes in society brought about by militarisation, deforestation, road construction and the transformation of water bodies into waste dumps, colonialism and the profit motive, the exhibition records in greater detail the environmental activism of women, including their long history of protesting against ecological destruction and their actions to protect the planet. The poster for the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp (1982-87) in the UK which echoes the photographic documentation of the women’s peace camp’s activities by the UK’s first all-female photography agency, Format Photographars (1982-85). More than 30 women from Greenham locked themselves in a fence by weaving a network of yarn to protest against the deployment of nuclear missiles by the US Air Force at the Royal Air Force base at Greenham Common in Berkshire, England. They used concepts and media from the art world to create illustrated leaflets conveying their anti-nuclear feminist message, and also used mirrors to reflect the illegal activities of the soldiers on the base, subverting the surveillance role of the camera. The knitting of the yarn mesh was both a specific rhetoric and a satirical gesture, as well as a technological engagement in the form of a cyber format, containing the metaphors of ‘building networks’ and ‘interconnecting in a spider web-like structure’. The lesbian photographer and activist JEB (Jill E. Biren) joined the Women’s Camp for Peace and Justice, set up by the Seneca Army Depot in upstate New York in 1983, and her camera gave visibility to women protesting militarism, violence against women, nuclear waste and environmental radiation, and the future destruction of the planet.
To stop the felling of trees and draw attention to the destruction of the forests, a group of women in the Garhwal Himalayas combined ecological awareness of forest destruction with Gandhian principles. Their protest strategy was to hug the trunks of trees or wrap themselves around them. The Chipko movement in action is vividly captured in the photographic series ‘Chipko Tree Huggers of the Himalayas’ (1994) by Pamela Singh, in which ‘chipko’ means ‘to hug’ in Hindi. Although the political and academic context of eco-feminist art has changed dramatically over the years (from the Cold War to global warming, from a reductionist view of women and nature to a pluralistic and intersectional approach), one constant has been the practitioners’ search for alternatives to the capitalist paradigm in indigenous cultures. The curator avoids the trap of romantic idealisation of indigenous cultures. She focuses on issues of land rights and spiritual connections with nature. Here, the consciousness of female subjectivity is expressed through direct activism and metaphorical performances. In contrast, artist Fern Shaffer endows the immateriality of the ecological environment through ritual. In her series ‘Nine Year Rituals’ (1995-2003), she travelled to places in the USA and Canada that were experiencing ecological damage, from the desert of Death Valley to Cape Green in Newfoundland, to perform shamanic healing rituals on disappearing primeval forests, microplastic-contaminated seas, and closed waterways and rivers.
From history to herstory, reclaiming the story of ‘she’
Historically, the hallmark of ecofeminism has been the struggle against patriarchal dualism, which exists between culture (almost synonymous with the concepts of civilisation and progress) and nature, and which is inextricably linked to the question of gender roles. One response to this was Goddess art, which aimed to reclaim the story of ‘her’ and the position of the female creator, and to empower women by emphasising their connection with nature, which was highly represented in the practices of female artists in the 1960s, who placed their bodies in the natural world, implying a highly politicised performance. For example, Judy Chicago, who began a series of works in the late 1960s in the Californian landscape ‘Women and Smoke’ (1971-72), Laura Aguilar, who used epic black-and-white landscape photography to where her body is presented as a rugged landscape, while Tee A. Corinne uses black-and-white photography to reorganise natural forms into the folds of a vulva. There are also artists such as Ana Mendieta and Fina Miralles, whose work blurs the boundaries between the body and the natural environment through different strategies of disguise, dissolving the distinction between the human and the non-human in the process of merging animals, plants and minerals, and intervening in the land in a ‘soft’ way to feminise the landscape.
In this narrative of unity with nature, the photographic work One Day and Back Then (Seated) (2007) by Xaviera Simmons seems paradoxical. The artist places herself in the middle of a towering sea of reeds in the American West, covering her body in black paint and wearing bright red lipstick, and sits on a throne-like wicker chair, imitating racial caricatures. This image contrasts sharply with the background and is intended to remind people that attempts to highlight subjectivity may affirm colonial and patriarchal power and negate individuals through racist stereotypes. What does it mean to merge oneself visually and ethically with the landscape, when the relationship between humans and nature is mediated through historically developed and socially constructed visual forms? The exhibition introduces the term ‘Performing Ground’ proposed by performance scholar Laura Levin as one of the thematic units, which refers to the conscious and strategic positioning of the self in the world. This requires us to rethink the established hierarchy of relationships between humans and non-humans. The idea of living in symbiosis with the natural world has radical feminist and queer potential, given the patriarchal and colonial logics of land ownership and cultivation. This makes eco-feminist art different from much land art that controls the natural environment on a large scale. Female artists place their bodies in the land, a process described by Mendieta as trying to find a place in the earth, and in doing so they seek to explore the difference between the body as land and owning land.
The exhibition also looks at the power dynamics of capitalist land ownership, environmental racism and environmental memory, while reflecting on who has the right to access the commons of humanity. Fay Godwin’s photographic series Our Forbidden Land (1990) traces how the long history of enclosure in the UK has shaped a landscape of secrets, where fields and paths have been emptied through physical barriers, legal means and acts of dispossession. Mónica de Miranda’s work, Salt Island (2022), transports the viewer to a semi-fictional imaginary space as she explores the long history of the black diaspora in Portugal. In recognition of the fact that the earth is a repository of ecological trauma, photographs of embroideries show women immersed in landscapes of water, vegetation and rock. Their stylised presence references the spiritual and physical connection to the land and water, as well as different moments of the anti-colonial struggle.
The exhibition concludes with an exploration of the relationship between gender and sexual culture and water, further exploring its queer potential. This to some extent demonstrates the basic concept of hydrofeminism, which is to criticise Cartesian dichotomies that have in some way contributed to anthropocentrism, as they attempt to separate mind from body, self from other, and human body from land and water. The exhibition therefore uses artworks to explore the posthuman potential of ‘human beings being water-based’, in order to draw the viewer into an intimate and ambiguous space. For example, Anne Duk Hee Jordan’s video installation “Ziggy and the Starfish” (2018) looks at sexuality from the perspective of marine life, in other words, at self-perception through the eyes of non-human “others”. Josèfa Ntjam’s “Unknown Aquazone” (2020) uses a combination of photography, video and installation to create an aquarium, but one that has been stripped of its scientific or decorative function. It is doubtful that although individual works in this ‘Liquid Bodies’ unit successfully destabilise gender binaries through the slippery relationship between water perception and gender, they may be prone to a singular reading of the relationship between water and women, namely as queer.
Is it a new focus of art practice or a rhetoric of a white-centred narrative?
The exhibition ‘RE/SISTERS’ vividly illustrates the conflict between two versions of reality: one is the reality created by the human-centric trajectory of history and civilisational progress, and the other is the more subtle ‘Herstory’, which highlights feminist land art, anti-nuclear work and ritual performances, among others, with a deep interconnection between humans and ecological nature. The exhibition also facilitates cross-generational comparisons of similar works. It covers more than 50 years of the development of eco-feminism, spanning from 1969 [such as Laura Grisi’s The Measuring of Time and Judy Chicago’s Purple Atmosphere], to works from 2022 [such as Monica Demiranda’s Salt Island]. In addition to providing a forum for thinking about social and environmental issues, it also helps to build a community of some kind, so that the legacy of the older generation of eco-feminist artists can be brought to the attention of the new generation of practitioners.
However, this museum-level exhibition is like a huge library, with such a wide range of content that it is a bit overwhelming, to the extent that the curatorial narrative is unbalanced: the exhibition texts seem to outweigh the artworks, the narrative on the first floor is more in-depth than that on the second, and even the final few thematic units lack the diversity of artistic expression, which to a certain extent can only achieve the effect of ‘stopping short’. In addition, 63% of the artists are from Europe and North America, and 16% are from Asia (they are from India, Malaysia, South Korea and Singapore). This data undoubtedly raises some contradictions: does the imbalance in the narratives of people of colour mean that this exhibition is still trapped in the white-centric cycle? Is the absence of Chinese artists a reflection of our decoupling from the West, or is it because our narratives around gender and ecology are inadequate?
It is worth noting that as early as the pandemic in 2020, the Thomas Erben Gallery in New York had already begun exploring ecofeminist art with the exhibition title ‘ecofeminism(s)’. ‘RE/SISTERS’ presents a larger-scale display of how artistic strategies can reflect the historical changes of the ecofeminist movement and emphasises the critical spirit and abilities of women. Coincidentally, ‘Green Snake: Feminist-Centred Ecology’ at the Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong also opened recently. It seems that the encounter between women and ecological issues and the intersectional analysis of all these complex issues have become hot topics in addition to current issues such as war and race. This is an awakening of ecological thinking and gender awareness, which teaches us to recognise intertwined power structures and systemic forms of oppression.
*The original text was written in Chinese and published in The Art Journal in 2024. Available at: https://www.theartjournal.cn/archives/exhibitions/132658
