We are pleased to announce that a selection of Rula Halawani's 'Gates of Heaven' series is part of The Guangzhou Image Triennial 2021 exhibition.
"Only in recent times we have been able to see the global landscape: images of the planet Earth and of the cosmos taken from the space. Today we perceive the globalscape not only from the distance through these images, but from the proximity that the globalization of the use of photography and video, together with the expansion of electronic communications, have made possible. This proximity has allowed us to view landscapes from all over the world by just a click on a screen. If we are now in the Era of the Image, this last is also the Era of Globalscape, which is the general subject of my proposal.
Starting from scientific and other space images, the exhibition will display a diversity of uses of landscape representation by contemporary photographers and video artists from different latitudes, through various techniques and methodologies. The show will not aim to offer a survey of contemporary landscaping, but to choreograph a visual and conceptual dialog between images coming from all over the world within the Museum’s space: a globalscape.
The exhibition will discuss new paths of contemporary landscape. It will not address landscape in photography and video as an artistic genre but as a means for creating images that configure and communicate very diverse meanings. This approach follows a tendency in contemporary art to use landscape instead of representing it. Landscape is increasingly operated by artists not as an end but as a gaze and as an instrument. In other words, in the works proposed for the Triennial the representation of natural and urban environments does not constitute an aim in itself: it is a channel for constructing a message, for triggering an experience, or for inquiring about the world in which we live and its recent tragedies."
- Gerardo Mosquera, Curator
March 2021
