Tai Kwun Contemporary’s ‘Green Snake’ exhibition explores indigeneity

In Return to Mu Village‘s The Great Fairy Lake (2023), a two-channel video installation by Chengdu-based artists Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun, a disembodied voice speaks over a rippled blue-grey lake, describing a Tibetan herders’ ritual intended to remedy disease and disasters caused by human environmental degradation. The aforementioned lake has already been the prey of these interventions: it is shrinking due to climate change. In the second channel, the shepherds solemnly perform the ritual against a lush grassy plain.

“Its purpose,” the voice explains the ritual, “is to establish a relationship between humans and other non-human beings, visible or invisible to us, that transcends current time and space.”

That sentiment could be the mission statement of “Green Snake: Women-Centered Ecologies,” an exhibition at Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong. Bringing together more than 30 artists and collectives from 20 countries, the exhibition, on display until April 1st, explores the deep connections between indigenous communities and the natural world.

Although many of the cultures represented in these works live far apart, the show suggests that they are all connected in space and time. The way to a brighter future, this show suggests, lies in recognizing these connections. (While the exhibition emphasizes the value of Indigenous knowledge, not all of the artists included are Indigenous per se).

The mixing and mingling of cultures and ecologies begins before entering the main galleries. In the hallway, a commissioned mural by the Indian artist Rohini Devasher, Genetic drift: Symbiont III – Parthenocissus snakes (2023), it extends through a stairwell that almost reaches the galleries, like a vine overhanging the building. In a rich mix of acrylic paint, dry pastel, charcoal and colored pencil, the mural depicts a single symbiont of various animals and plants bleeding into each other, or an organism made up of different living things in a mutually beneficial relationship.

This hybridity is repeated throughout the exhibition, and the works of geographically distant artists are well placed to provoke thought. Cecilia Vicuña, born in Chile, is showing the phenomenon Bicycle Snake (2023), a sculpture that fashions unused bicycle tires into a coiled snake. It is set opposite Nepali artist Karan Shrestha cloud babies (2023), also newly commissioned for this show. Shreshta’s installation features a hanging wooden ring modeled after traditional Nepalese water pipes. The sculpture is beautifully sculpted in a manner reminiscent of snake scales; water flows through the ring, gently changing its shape over time. Both works connect man-made materials and nature, the former creating new beauty from consumer junk and the latter finding wisdom in today’s human methods.

Rituals of reparation form the core of “Green Snake,” as artists look to long-standing traditions or create new ones in response to environmental damage and colonial extraction.

In Lost shadows, a video by Gidree Bawlee, a Bangladeshi art initiative created by Kamruzzaman Shadhin and co-directed by Salma Jamal Moushum, puppetry, shadow theater and live music depict mythical and living creatures returning as ghosts to depleted rivers. These specters mourn the destruction and try to guide the community to repair. Gidree Bawlee is among the many participants here who pair contemporary non-Indigenous artists with Indigenous artists for collaborative efforts that bridge cultural differences.

Playing the opposite Lost shadows Seba Calfuqueo is a Mapuche artist TRAY TRAY CO (2022), a video that can also be seen at the current Whitney Biennial. In it, Calfuqueo pulls a long blue cloth, imitating a waterfall, from a forest preserve in Chile. The waterfalls are sacred spaces for the Mapuche, the country’s dominant indigenous group, who have been repeatedly massacred and whose land has been confiscated by various Chilean governments. (This also forms the basis of a Vicuña work included in this show.) Calfuqueo’s video ends with them reaching a pool under a waterfall, diving into the water, drawing the cloth around their bodies, and then standing under the water, in effect , regaining their place in the limited lands.

So many biennials and exhibitions these days refer to indigenous wisdom, often with so few notable works that these references seem anything but superficial. But when engaging with tribal groups, the artists of “Green Snake” find resonant ways of engaging with these forms of knowledge.

Return to Mu Village, CEO and Chen’s video is the result of years of collaboration and research involving Tibetan pastoralists. In a friendly sound piece, Animal Elegy (2023), Cao and Chen create a black woven yak tent called Water system shelter #4. Enter this contemplative space and you will hear the traditional song “Elegy of the Animals”, where shepherds use special singing techniques to imitate non-human sounds to connect with animals and nature. The letters, translated and then drawn on the wall, speak of the experience of reincarnation as an animal, from a vulture to a beetle.

The exhibition concludes with visions of the future guided by indigenous voices. Filipino-Canadian artist Stephanie Comilang and German-Ecuadorian artist Simon Speiser are collaborating on a video and a paired virtual reality experience. Piña, Why is the sky blue? (2021). The video includes interviews with Palaman shamans from the Philippines and the Ecuadorian feminist activist collective Cyber ​​Amazonas, and adds footage of a pineapple-shaped data collection tower and the character of Piña, who is apparently depicted as an indigenous or transcendental AI. to be

Comilang and Speiser use VR to powerful effect, allowing the viewer to experience Piña, which is directed by your name. The character first invites you into your home and surrounding environment, while the music swells in the background. VR then switches to beautiful views of the natural world, often with an indigenous person centered in the frame. In one, a young boy stands in front of you, his eyes raised as he waves them in the air. In another, a woman wades into a pool, her eyes fixed on you as she unfurls a photo of another indigenous woman.

Questions about survival, ancestral knowledge, and the natural world permeate the voiceover that guides you through Piña’s life. Sentiments are tied to tech jargon—words about downloads, data, portals, and the like—and, VR seems to suggest, they just need to fix it to find an indigenous future. In the next room, a mostly first-person video game-like animation by Calfuqueo re-inhabits a subjective indigenous, placing the viewer as a Mapuche woman in a forest. This woman is shown gathering mushrooms, a long-standing Mapuche symbol of resilience in the face of colonial violence.

As he exits the exhibit, he reaches the far edge of Devasher’s stunning mural, connecting the show’s beginning and end. In “Green Snake” the boundaries are always blurred.