Uriel Orlow, Reader for the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) at the University of Westminster, received the Sharjah Biennial Prize 2017 for his work Theatrum Botanicum that was exhibited in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
The multi-component work Theatrum Botanicum (2016) envisions the botanical world as both witness to and actor in the enduring legacy of colonialism in South Africa, looking to the botanical world as a stage for politics at large through film, photography, installation and sound.
Working from the dual vantage points of South Africa and Europe, the project considers plants as both witnesses and actors in history, and as dynamic agents – linking nature and humans, rural and cosmopolitan medicine, tradition and modernity – across different geographies, histories and systems of knowledge, with a variety of curative, spiritual and economic powers.