Opening the exhibition, a line of flower studies brings together eight artworks from different regions and contexts as a garden. The garden appears as a line, but it moves in all kinds of directions—as vegetal life does, to whisper very different stories.
The section reflects on the harrowing number of contemporary artists, whose mediums vary, who have been engaging in flower studies as a side practice: a humble, almost closed-door practice. Encountering them during research, it has been difficult to grasp any exact meaning. Many of these floral works were created in exile or in hiding. They bear the memory of trauma—of landscapes marked by displacement and the historical extraction of vital forces.
The flower studies have an element of quietness or apparent passivity. An uncontroversial activity, the act of drawing, painting, or photographing flowers nevertheless foregrounds persistence—the urge to keep working, even under difficult mental states or circumstances. Sometimes it is done for the sake of the ongoing practice itself as a form of resistance, at other times they smuggle hidden messages to pass on.
The section is inspired by the artist and poet Nyi Pu Lay, who died in hiding. He spent his time in seclusion making flower studies. Until today, it is too risky to retrieve the paintings as they might reveal the hiding place of his entire body of work. His work is not displayed, but the missing flower may potentially be carried in the imagination of the viewer through a long descriptive label written by his friend, the author Ma Thida.
Fredj Moussa’s flower is one from a recurrent gesture of drawing and painting. Some flowers are annotated with inscriptions, such as the word warda, both Arabic for “rose” and the name of a pasta brand; or with dates where only a number remains, marking the everydayness of the act. Yet the flowers are imaginary. It is a studio practice exploring the absurdity of drawing fictional flowers of imagined lands.
Grenada, an island country in the Caribbean, was colonized by European settlers. French colonizers extinguished the Indigenous population, the Caribs, and then brought slaves from Africa to turn the island into plantations. In 2024, Steve McQueen photographed the flowers that have remained a constant throughout the island’s many turns of fate. His portrayal of Grenada’s flowers—beautiful, enigmatic, powerful—and the dissonant, alarming title of the series adds to the discordant hinge of beauty and brutality on which this section of the exhibition is premised.
Revered for her puppets and politically incisive ironic photomontages, Hannah Höch was part of the Berlin Dada storm, an anti-war, anti-bourgeoisie pacifist art movement that erupted during the First World War. Bisexual, ex-communist, ex-Dada, blacklisted, and poor, Höch self-exiled to an old guardhouse in Tegel forest on the outskirts of Berlin in 1939, parking a caravan outside. She buried her photomontages, objects, and works by other Dada artists in the garden. Although the photomontages were hidden, she designed the garden itself—still extant today—as a collage of vegetables, flowers, and as rumored plants banned by the Nazi regime.
The flower study by Erika Kobayashi whispers the story of a theater troupe of Japanese girls who were forced to build paper balloons to transport bombs with the winter wind current to the United States. The group toured fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in 1938 wearing silk kimonos with cherry blossom motifs. The cherry blossom stands as an ambiguous symbol of Japanese imperial power and its expansionist dreams in the 1930s. At the same time, Kobayashi highlights the flower’s resilience in the face of nuclear annihilation, transcending mere symbolism.
Arguably the most renowned Roma artist, Ceija Stojka painted scenes recalled from her internment at the Auschwitz, Ravensbruck, and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. In this work of absolute restraint from 2011, fear is made lucid through its peculiar framing focusing on spiraling cobblestones. The presence of military boots in the top right corner instills apprehension, while small yellow flowers make their way between the stones.
The refuge garden of the artist OMARA Mara Oláh is a composition of flowerbeds of poppies and a view of the garden in a landscape painted onto cigarette boxes. It is a medium she often used, along with small pieces of wood and tarot cards, on which she made stunning, angry, erotic works and scenes of her life as part of the Roma community in Hungary, often annotated with daring, audacious, or humorous captions.
Text: Zasha Colah and Valentina Viviani
https://13.berlinbiennale.de/en/artists/flowers
