Curators' Series 7: A Special Arrow Was Shot In The Neck…

Curated by Vivian Ziherl and Natasha Ginwala

at DRAF, Camden

A Special Arrow Was Shot In The Neck… is the seventh edition of our Curators’ Series, a platform to support independent curators, duos and organisations to develop and deliver thematic exhibitions with newly commissioned works.

This edition is with guest curators Natasha Ginwala and Vivian Ziherl, co-founders of the ongoing curatorial research project Landings.

This group exhibition brings together a range of international artists, poets and choreographers, including artists represented in the David and Indrė Roberts Collection. The participants include, Etel Adnan, Boyle Family, Chandralekha, Bonita Ely, Simone Forti, Ganesh Haloi, Camille Henrot, Yee I-Lann, Juma-adi, The Otolith Group, Prabhakar Pachpute, Dashrath Patel, Selma and Sofiane Ouissi with research contributions by Angela Melitopoulos & Angela Anderson, Filipa César, Simryn Gill and Rachel O’Reilly.

‘History doesn’t drive on camels anymore but it’s still eating dust. Communication lines, since, are buried deep under the skin.’

Etel Adnan, Seasons, 2008.

Modernity, as a human endeavour over Land, has drawn up the categories by which territory is divided and placed under a contract of subjugation. How might the current order of material progress then be infiltrated by the agency of Land as a narrative substance? Facing the geographic imperative of capital stand the claims of Land as a living archive, as political matter and as corporeal agent.

A Special Arrow Was Shot In The Neck… engages artistic practices that approach Land as a language-form of kinship, affect and decolonial resistance. Bonita Ely’s 1970s etchings of the salinating Murray-Darling River constellate with Indonesian artist Juma-adi’s errant figures bearing the burden of displaced geography. The South-East Asian archipelago is a matrix of socio-political memory in the Batik works of Yee I-Lann, while the repetitive hand gestures of rural women ceramics-makers form a movement-score in the work of Tunisian choreographers Selma and Sofiane Ouissi.

The abstract paintings and illustrations of Ganesh Haloi draw together symmetries of the organic world with an archaeological imaginary. The exhibition will also feature a new site-specific mural by Indian artist Prabhakar Pachpute, responding to DRAF’s Camden gallery space.

An accompanying presentation of artistic research and archival materials will assemble references examining the subjective conditions of extraction. Desert fault lines converge in the seismic narrations of Californian ‘earthquake sensitives’ in The Otolith Group’s film Medium Earth (2013) screened at Rio Cinema, Dalston on Tuesday 22 July, 6.15pm.

With thanks to The Map House, London; Milani Gallery, Brisbane; Experimenta, Bangalore; Akar Prakar, Kolkata and LUX Artists Moving Image, London for their support of the exhibition.

The Curators’ Series is supported by Arts Council England.