Gardening the Suburbs
Gardens are micro-landscapes and gardening, like mapping, is a way of allocating territory. Over two years, Corinne Silva travelled across twenty-two Israeli settlements making photographs of public and private gardens, in order to explore the ways in which gardens and gardening may represent the Israeli State’s ongoing expansionist ambitions. Garden State takes the form of a large-scale installation made up of clusters of photographs of these Israeli gardens. An accompanying publication, Garden State, contains photographs from the installation, a botanical table by botanist Sabina Knees, an essay by curator Val Williams and a conversation between Corinne Silva and Eyal Weizman.
Silva's practice is concerned with landscape as a complex interrelation of culture and geography, politics and botany, living beings and inanimate matter. The artist explores these connections through a direct and immediate engagement with the territories she visits, on journeys through Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. The effect of human activity on land, geographic and political borders, migration and ecology are among the issues that are investigated in Silva’s photographic and video works.
