On Sensing Grounds: Landings and Rana Hamadeh

A special event featuring artist Rana Hamadeh is being held within the framework of ‘Landings’ (curators Natasha Ginwala and Vivian Ziherl) research exhibition ‘Sensing Grounds: Mangroves, unauthentic belonging and extra-territoriality.’ Hamadeh’s presentation deploys image-conversations exploring the zone of ‘falling’ to consider its potential as a thought-form in queering orientation: The talk is an exhaustive deliberation on the notion/gesture of ‘falling’: falling as a form of legal apathy, falling as a spatial, choreographic gesture, and falling as a dynamic of virulence.

Following an introduction and image-reading by the curators, Hamadeh leads a journey amidst states of ‘falling’—from the spatial and legal coding of the terms ‘falling ill’, ‘immunity’ and ‘quarantine’, to outer-space and land-sea relations plotted through science fiction projections, geo-political territory formation and cross-border travel. Through a non-linear narrative sequence the presentation traverses histories of the Western Sahara, across iron ore mines, cholera quarantines, ancient Athenian courts of law, colonial fantasies of twin seas, and post-colonial state-sponsored claims of resistance within the Arab context.

How may the morphology and sensing mechanisms of the Mangrove concieve modes of unauthentic belonging as a field of ‘extra-territoriality’ and inversions of the self?

‘Land’ remains one of the great unspokens of recent cultural criticism. Even as the circulations of contemporary art extended into diverse geographical regions over the past two decades, the criticism that sought to grasp this transformation has tended to emphasize transitory presence, diaspora and unfixed capital.

Landings surveys modernity through the consideration of “Land” as a narrative subject of history. Focusing on historical models and ‘visions’ of the earth as well as its interior constituents; from the records of ancient explorers and polymaths, artistic and botanical studies of mangroves as sensing grounds and an inverted selfhood as well as cross-disciplinary presentations on nineteenth century photography and film archives that visualize agrarian life and its techniques during colonial administration.

In conversation with artists, filmmakers, anthropologists, cultural critics and scholars, Landings seeks thought-models, indicators and material proposals towards making sense of our planetary conditions.

Featured works: Roberto Chabet (courtesy of the Asia Art Archive), Bonita Ely, Rana Hamadeh, Irene Kopelman, Tejal Shah, Lawrence Weiner, Terue Yamauchi and archival materials from the Tropenmuseum (Amsterdam), the North Stradbroke Island Historical Museum (Dunwich), the Biodiversity Heritage Library and the David Rumsey Map Collection.