21 September–15 December

Press Preview: Thursday 19 September, 5-6pm email [email protected] to RSVP.

Public Opening: Friday 20 September, 6-9pm, free all welcome.

Constellations: Racial myths, land, and labour

Curated by Su-Ying Lee

Carl Beam, David Blandy, Andrea Chung, Minerva Cuevas, Aria Dean, Inyang Essien, Andil Gosine, Deborah Jack, Dinh Q. Le, Candice Lin, Daniela Ortiz, Chanell Stone, Hank Willis Thomas, Jeff Thomas, Bo Wang & Lu Pan, Carrie Mae Weems, Connie Zheng

Constellations: Racial myths, land, and labour begins with the flows of people and plants circulated through the routes of early European colonialism. Plants, which were valuable as food, medicine and for other industries were a key driver for colonial exploration and occupation. Ethnobotanical knowledge, expertise, and labour were extracted from racialized peoples, activities that settlers carried out in tandem with the disturbance of land. In real and symbolic terms, a deep enmeshment exists between the disturbance of land, and the disruption and exploitation of transported human lives. Today, numerous aspects of our day-to-day lives, as wide ranging as access to health care and the continuing success of insurance companies, continue to be linked to structures invented or instrumentalized to limit the freedoms of racialized people in favour of colonial capitalism. Under the long shadows of racial and plantation capitalism and unfreedom, how do we conceive of racial identity? How can racialized people relate to place, land and nature under this legacy of trafficking, forced labour and displacement? Constellations: Racial myths, land, and labour brings together work by artists who look at the connected nature of race-making, colonialism, and land.  

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