Join artists Kristaps Ancāns, Agate Tuna and Anna Malicka for a presentation and discussion of “Botanical Timeline,” a new collaborative multi-media installation commissioned for the exhibition. The event is moderated by curator Corina L. Apostol. This timeline reconsiders our relationship with plants by highlighting voices, gestures, and approaches that challenge dominant assumptions. It supports the opening up of new perspectives and encourages multiple ways of thinking and imagining. Reflecting plant entanglements with one another, including the histories of colonialism, gender, economics, and politics, the piece explores how words make worlds and put forth perspectives for different futures.

Each video chapter in the “Botanical Timeline” works as a tool to access the social and ecological imaginaries that unfold in the exhibition, acknowledging diverse ways of being, thinking, and doing. It also reflects how colonial taxonomies have shaped the language and conditions of botanical conscriptions that were extensions of political power. The artists and curator will address strategies for a conscious untangling of colonial vocabulary as new voices emerge, creating space for reflections and producing textual tools to understand botanical lives.

Agate Tūna is a multidisciplinary artist based in Riga, Latvia whose artistic practice started from a suggestion of a fortune teller. Agate’s main choice of medium is analogue and experimental photography, but she also works in painting and graphic arts. By combining documentary and fiction Agate’s photography, installation, and oral history works focus on the post-Soviet popularity of esoteric practices. She holds a BA in Arts from the Painting department in the Art Academy of Latvia. Currently, Agate continues her studies in the Developing Photographic Language at ISSP school and POST, an interdisciplinary MA programme at the Art Academy of Latvia.

Anna Malicka creates drawings on paper, textile work, handicrafts and audio-visual content. She takes her interests in scribbled abstraction, everyday aesthetics, pop-culture and layers them to construct a crafted imaginary space. Her practice is processual and based on subjective observations, often overturning a giddy theme in a new context. She earned her Bachelor's degree in 2020 for Motion.Image.Sound at the Art Academy of Latvia and is currently doing her graduate studies at interdisciplinary department POST.

Kristaps Ancāns is an artist whose practice investigates the confusion between humans, nature, and machines through a conceptual game with its own artificial intelligence. He works across media in fields of sculpture, text, installation which often contain a kinetic component. He is the co-head of POST, interdisciplinary MA Program at the Art Academy of Latvia. He lives and works between London, Riga and Tallinn.

Corina L. Apostol is a curator at the Tallinn Art Hall and the co-curator of Beyond Matter – Cultural Heritage on the Verge of Virtual Reality. She has been appointed as the curator of the Estonian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022). She is the editor of Making Another World Possible (Routledge, 2019).