‘‘Floraphilia: Revolution of Plants’’ (Temporary Gallery, Germany).
MY engagement with another plantcentred exhibition, ‘‘Floraphilia: Revolution of Plants’’ in Cologne, started strongly with a YouTube introduction by curator Aneta Rostkowska. With the artworks tantalisingly on display in the background, my expectation that the camera would then turn to the actual works was not met. What followed was a somewhat frustrating attempt to view the artworks via Google Drive. I was unable to easily access images of the exhibition using this interface, which is disappointing as there are many interesting international artists in this group exhibition, including Candice Lin and Beatriz Santiago Munoz.
As with most digital presentations of exhibitions, it is very difficult to get a sense of how these images of works relate to one another in physical space. Toggling between images in Google Drive only exacerbates the time lag between the sequence and relationship of images. The twodimensionality of digital images, and the nearSisyphean task of trying to understand how the various artworks speak to and engage with each other, was absolute and unremitting in this Google Drive presentation.
The platform inhibited the viewer from engaging with the exhibition’s rejection of philosopher Theodor W. Adorno’s claim that nature is apolitical. While the curator mentioned more recent work on plant sentience by Michael Marder, choosing Adorno’s 1957 proposition is an interesting starting point.