With Ella Belenky, Harun Morrison, Oona Wilkinson takes flowers as a point of departure. The title references Aconite, also known as Wolfsbane, as a figure for a politics of care.
Without Dirt is the fourth exhibition in a series of shows that takes the flower as a point of departure. The title references Aconite as a figure for a politics of care. Also known as Wolfsbane, Aconite can take root without soil and is among the most toxic plants in the world. Despite its lethality, it has a long history within traditional medicinal systems, where it is handled only through careful and extensive preparation. It embodies ambivalence: care entangled with harm, and survival bound to risk.
The exhibition also reflects on how trio and small group shows carry an implicit structure of dialogue and trust, where artists work in proximity, responding to and supporting one another’s practices.
Through their research-led practices, Oona Wilkinson, Harun Morrison and Ella Belenky each approach care, precarity and positionality as intertwined conditions. Wilkinson’s work explores material systems of reuse and redistribution, examining how labour, waste and value circulate beyond stable hierarchies. Morrison’s research engages histories of colonial extraction and embodied resistance, tracing links between ecological violence and lived experience. Belenky’s practice focuses on processes of translation and repair, asking how attention and adaptation shape both material and social infrastructures. Taken together, these research-based approaches xplore how life emerges between risk and resilience, using relationality as a way of thinking about and sustaining collective futures.
Notes:
The first exhibition in the series, Cryopreservation: Need Flowers Tomorrow? (2013), considered the suspended life of the flower in relation to futurity, preservation and delay. Its sardonic title responded to the speculative, end-of-days imaginaries circulating among tech entrepreneurs at the time. The second and third shows were, More News About Flowers (2023) and Even More News About Flowers (also 2023), returned to the flower through questions of reproduction, both botanical and image-based, borrowing its title from an essay by Walter Benjamin.
