Forest Times

Archive: Monographs

Forest Times

Forest Times brings together two major recent projects by artist Uriel Orlow, Reading Wood (Backwards), 2022, and Forest Futurism, 2024, in which plants are simultaneously political actors, witnesses to the past and guides for the future. With Reading Wood (Backwards), Orlow turns his attention to the entanglements of human and non-human actors in order to read the archive against the grain, asking what would restituting to the natural world mean, while with Forest Futurism, it is the life of plants themselves, outside or beyond the time of human history, that takes center stage. Working across film and 3D modelling, the latter project connects the palaeontological deep time of tree fossils with future forest modelling to imagine, with the voice of children, more-than-human scenarios from the point of view of trees. Set in South Tyrol/Alto Adige and conducted in dialogue with a palaeobotanist and climate scientists, the project forges connections between local scientific research and global climate concerns and the urgent need for alternative visions of the future.

Uriel Orlow. Forest Times. With essays by Lucia Pietroiusti and Ana Teixeira Pinto, and an introduction by Nicole Schweizer, curator of contemporary art at MCBA. Design by In the Shade of a Tree, Paris.

More information can be found at K. Verlag

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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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Communal Herbal Knowledge

Communal Herbal Knowledge was a year long project in the Central London neighbourhood Church Street Ward.

Following workshops and meetings with various community groups around the use of plant-based home remedies and the passing on of traditional medicinal knowledge reflecting the ethnic diversity of the area, Uriel Orlow and the Showroom London collaborated with gardener Carole Wright to create a local medicinal plant garden at Penfold Community Hub, London together with Penfold Community Hub Gardening Group residents and centre users, Mosaic Community Trust and Church Street Library English Conversation Group and other local residents.

Accompanying workshops put the garden to use and a set of four manuals document the communal plant knowledge that was produced through this process and can be used as a shared tool by everyone. After the official end of the artistic project, the garden project was taken over by the community groups and further developed.

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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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Terrain vague – Persistent Images – حركات غير مكتملة

Terrain vague حركات غير مكتملة Persistent images gathers works by Céline Condorelli and Uriel Orlow in a multi-voice artist book conceived by Sophie Demay and Lola Halifa-Legrand. It explores blind spots, unexpected epilogues and disappearances in the grand narratives of History; starting from Alexandria and the Suez canal in twentieth century Egypt. Composed of four stories, the book engages with the constitutive movements affecting time and space: movements of people and goods, the flow of capital, political movements, removal of statues (and regimes) and migrating species. As a complement, the last chapter assembles contributions from Bassam El Baroni, Marianne Hultman, Jean-Marie Straub, Gilane Tawadros.

Published by Alexandria Contemporary Image Forum and Oslo Kunstforening

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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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Formuler en Parlant

Newspaper, 24pp, full colour, edition 1000 (Zürich: edition fink, 2009)

Uriel Orlow and Andrea Thal in conversation with Marie-Antoinette Chiarenza & Daniel Hauser (Relax), Katharina Schlieben & Sønke Gau, Eran Schaerf.

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Oddly

Newspaper, 40pp, b+w, edition 1000

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One Day Gazette

newspaper, 12pp, 2007

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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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Re: the archive, the image, and the very dead sheep

Bookwork by Uriel Orlow and Ruth Maclennan, 160 pp.
Design by Kapitza. London: Double agents, 2004 ISBN: 0-9548947-0-7

A ‘ready-made archive’, a holiday correspondence and a philosophico-anecdotal meditation on history.

Ruth Maclennan and Uriel Orlow write to each other while on holiday in the Highlands of Scotland and in Zurich and the Swiss Alps. The correspondents draw on documented, anecdotal and imagined histories of their surroundings to produce associative genealogies: mapping thought, image, object and experience. Seeking correspondences between what has been, what might have been and what could arise, they speculate on pre-archival moments and the archive’s aftermath. This idiosyncratic historiography brings together Cabaret Voltaire, Pictish burial mounds, Lenin, Joyce, the Gulf Stream, and the Rosetta Stone.

The correspondence is expanded by commentaries, afterthoughts and annotations by Robin Banerji, Finn Fordham, Mikhail Karikis and Nicholas Noyes.
The book collates images from personal collections, the internet and museum shops to form an autonomous, yet related image-archive, which generates its own associations and references. This, together with lists of names and terms and a bibliography performs the role of a thesaurical archive-catalogue that provides an alternative entry to the book.

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What the billboard saw / La ville mode d’emploi

Bookwork by Uriel Orlow, published by Kunsthalle Fribourg (2005), limited edition of 200, signed

A notebook-sized archive of the billboards vision of the city interspersed with a compendium of reflections on the urban condition by de Certeau, Perec, Acconci, Sinclair and others.

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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).

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The History of Marseille

With J. Maizlish Mole. Edition of 1000, 1998

A tourist leaflet with an alternative history/sites of Marseille distributed during the Football World Cup 1998.