Conversing with Leaves

Archive: Monograph

Conversing with Leaves

Publication released the occasion of the exhibition Conversing with Leaves by Uriel Orlow at Kunsthalle Mainz, November 30, 2019 – March 15, 2020.

“The title derives from the book of the same name written by Luther Burbank, a nineteenth-century American botanist renowned for watching plants and conducted numerous botanical experiments. Significantly, he used his knowledge to teach plants, as it were, as he considered them to be learning organisms that could be optimized and enhanced for human use. Although more than a century separates Burbank and artist Uriel Orlow, there are considerable overlaps between them, regarding the relationship between plants and humans, and the communication between them. However, there is one fundamental difference as regards their visions: Burbank specifically wanted to shape, cultivate, and enhance plants; while also interested in human influence on plants, Orlow does not himself exercise it, instead providing space for the plants themselves to tell the story. In media such as film, photography, and installations he uses archive and documentary material, the city, architecture and real people, to tempt the stories out of trees, flowers, herbs, and seeds — stories that are deeply bound up with humans, our past, our place in the world today — in short: our lives.

It is clear that plants have long served people and have constantly been made into witnesses of history, memorials to certain events, and therapeutic agents. Plants have for centuries been put to many purposes foreign to them, and have been exploited by all of us. That said, the ways in which they are used differ greatly, as do the interests involved.”

Stefanie Böttcher

Contributions by Uriel Orlow, Stefanie Böttcher, Lina Louisa Krämer, Shela Sheikh and Hans Rudolf Reust.

Monograph published in 2020 by Archive Books, Berlin.

More info can be found at Archive Books here.

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Soil Affinities

Uriel Orlow: Soil Affinities

Affinités Des Sols | Soil Affinities explores the connections of (post) colonial history and the movement of plants for agriculture, from Aubervilliers, a northern suburb of Paris, to formerly French West Africa (Mali and Senegal). This publication and Uriel Orlow’s artistic project of the same name retrace the lines and networks of earthly connections between plants and humans through images, maps, texts, and interviews conducted in France, Senegal, and Mali over the span of two years.

Co-published by Aubervilliers Laboratories / Shelter Press with the generous support of CNAP, National Center of Plastic Arts.

136 pp.
thread-sewn softcover with dustjacket
3 color offset with black / white images
Size: 24 x 32 cm
Language (s): English + French
Rennes / Paris, January 2019
ISBN: 978-2-36582-030-1

More information can be found at Shelter Press here.

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Theatrum Botanicum

Uriel Orlow: Theatrum Botanicum

Edited by Shela Sheikh and Uriel Orlow
Contributions by Sita Balani, Melanie Boehi, Clelia Coussonet, Karen Flint, Jason T. W. Irving, Nomusa Makhubu, Bettina Malcomess, Karin van Marle, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll

This publication is made up of two intertwining books: one documents the works of Theatrum Botanicum, including the scripts for two films; the second is a compendium of brief, commissioned essays that aims to offer an accessible snapshot of the complex and multifaceted issues that inform and are raised by the artworks. The independent but interrelated essays, which either speak directly to the artworks or follow lines of inquiry alongside them, cover perspectives from postcolonial cultural studies; art criticism and art history; natural history, botany (including ethnobotany and economic botany), and conservation; jurisprudence and critical legal studies; and critical race studies.

Design by In the shade of a tree (Samuel Bonnet, Sophie Demay, and Maël Fournier-Comte)

June 2018, English
21.5 x 29 cm, 368 pages, color ill., softcover
ISBN 978-3-95679-415-5
€29.00
Sternberg Press

Access the preface, introduction and bibliography here

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Unmade Film

An audio-visual project about the impossibility of a film on the Deir Yassin massacre, exploring the complex ramifications of the place (2 volumes artist’s book).

22cm x 28cm (softcover)
272 + 164 pages (ill.)

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Time is a Place

Published by Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg on occasion of the exhibition Time is a Place at Kunsthaus CentrePasquart, Biel.
Texts: Felicity Lunn, Uriel Orlow with: Andrea Thal, Anna Barseghian and Mikhail Karikis, Ruth Maclennan, Eric Jacobson.
Concept: Anna Frei, Uriel Orlow
Design: Anna Frei
Photographs of the exhibition: David Gagnebin-de-Bons
ISBN: 978-3-86984-338-4

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The Short and the Long of It

40pp, full colour, Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2011
with an essay by Marina Vishmidt.

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Sounds from Beneath

by Mikhail Karikis and Uriel Orlow, 32pp, full colour, Brussels: Sub Rosa, 2011
with texts by Sue Jones, Lucy Reynolds, Katerina Gregos, Steven Connor

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The Benin Project

48pp, full colour, London: future perfect, 2007
with an essay by Gilane Tawadros, design by Ben Branagan

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Deposits

128pp, full colour, Berlin: The Greenbox, 2006
with contributions by Monica Ross, Alexander Garcia Düttmann, Eric Jacobson, Michael Newman and Kai-Uwe Hemken, design by Anja Lutz

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Time+Again: Critical Contradictions in Chris Marker’s La Jetée

PhD thesis (University of the Arts, 2002)

The thesis is an investigation into the critical power of a work of art. This critical power is seen to be produced by paradoxes which are particular to it and which have the potential to infiltrate theoretical debates in the form of contradictions. The thesis takes the form of a case study of Chris Marker’s 1962 film La Jetée. The main concern in the consideration of La Jetée is its critical relation to conceptions of time in different discursive contexts.

More specifically, La Jetée’s criticality is attributed to two particular paradoxes which are examined in two separate yet related parts of the thesis. Both parts are divided into three chapters which deal with the same paradox but under the aegis of different theoretical frameworks. In part one the paradoxical narrative scenario of the repetition of the protagonist’s death at the beginning and at the end of the film is related to narratological (chapter 1), psychoanalytical (chapter 2) and philosophical (chapter 3) conceptions of time and death; conceptions which are in turn destabilised by the economies of contradiction produced by the notions of haunting, trauma and eschatological ethics. Part two considers the paradoxical status of the image in La Jetée between photography and cinema. The examination of the contradicting photographic and cinematic medium-specificities and their attendant temporalities (chapter 4) leads to a consideration of the temporality of the image independent from its alleged medium (chapter 5) and eventually to a new conception of the notion of medium and its temporality on the basis of qualitative pictorial powers rather than in terms of a quantifiable status (chapter 6).