The Garden

The exhibition project THE GARDEN Cinematics of the Soil, is dedicated to the life and work of the British filmmaker, artist and activist Derek Jarman. His film of the same name, The Garden, as well as his legendary garden Prospect Cottage, become the starting point for a contemporary artistic examination of essential questions of our society and its future.

For the exhibition at the Betonhalle in Silent Green, the challenge in the integral design commisioned, was to link in many ways the special topography and utopian potential of Jarman’s garden on the south coast of England, where film footage, objects, diaries and paintings from his last place of residence, Prospect Cottage, dialogue with the work specially made for the exhibition by diverse contemporary artists, whose different positions, expanded the views of Jarman on topics such as environmental pollution and disease, collectivity and resilience.

The film The Garden (1990), created against the background of AIDS activism and the anti-nuclear power movement, takes the contradictory nature of this place as its central theme: between dream and reality, idyll and pain, beauty and transience, nature becomes an analogy of the creeping decay of the human body in the context of climate change, disease and destruction.

The exhibition, with sound and media installations specially conceived for this project as well as talks, workshops and a film programme, aim to develop new forms of image production with and for the earth, telling of its cycles of creation and decay, its resilience and capacity for healing.

Artistic Positions: Mareike Bernien (DE), Dagie Brundert (DE), CHEAP Art Collective (INT), Peter Cusack (UK), Bettina Ellerkamp (DE), Alex Gerbaulet (DE), Inas Halabi (PAL), Jörg Heitmann (DE), Oliver Husain (DE), Derek Jarman (UK), Philip Scheffner (DE), Kerstin Schroedinger (DE) and Howard Sooley (UK)