17 January - 21 January 2024
London
Key Responsibilities:
Creative Production
Production Management
Exhibition Design
Creative Production
Production Management
Exhibition Design
Comprised of artists Krasimira Butseva, Lina Ivanova, Lucas Gabellini-Fava, Victoria Louise Doyle, and Alexander Mourant, Revolv is a non-hierarchical collective concerned with collaborative practices, creative education, and photographic innovation. They specialise in ‘Expanded Photography’ – a “sensorial and intellectual challenge” that begins in photography before pushing beyond understandings of the medium. “[Expanded Photography] practitioners retain a certain photographic thinking as they move away from photography as the sole form of expression,’’ the collective says. “They might incorporate moving image, sculpture, drawing, performance, installation, and other media.” The camera, “haunted by its mechanical nature,’’ becomes an epistemologically distanced parent, a rule to be broken, a house to escape.
Inspired by the horticultural technique of grafting, whereby two plants are joined together in order to enhance their resilience and yield, the showcased contemporary photography proposes an ethos of entanglement and symbiosis. In the exhibition, the artists’ labour is contextualised from a variety of positions to question their understanding and engagement with the land as a site of work, resistance, action, co-dependence, regeneration and communion.
Transcending the traditional boundaries of photography, Grafting: The Land and the Artist challenges preconceived notions about photography as a less laborious medium, and digs deeper to reflect on what a sustainable and meaningful artistic practice can look like in the age of climate emergency. The exhibition offers viewers a space to reconsider the land and its interconnected forms of knowledge, whilst encouraging contemplation on how society has engaged with, transformed and inhabited the natural world throughout history.