Art Sonje Center is pleased to present the exhibition Tired Palm Trees from July 9 to August 4, 2024 at The Ground. Committed to addressing climate change and the ecological issues, Art Sonje Center has explored actionable strategies as an art museum to promote sustainable living. This exhibition is part of the museum’s 2024 program, designed to uncover new possibilities for addressing the global crisis, guided by three pivotal themes under three keywords: “Transversality, Time, and Possibility.”
Despite its title, Tired Palm Trees is not an exhibition about palm trees, but rather an exhibition that borrows many symbolic images implied by palm trees. It explores the impact of human desires on climate change and the social phenomena derived from it, such as habitat encroachment and migration due to political power structures and the appropriation of nature through artifacts within a political, social, and/or historical context. Highly symbolic plants like palm trees have long been utilized as political tools on many levels. For example, houses and cities are intentionally decorated with plants to cover up something or to greenwash. In this exhibition, palm trees emerge as objects that are not only tired of the colonialist attitudes and gaze of humans but also the constant misinterpretation and misuse of their habitats that plants have had to endure throughout human history. Plants are symbols and witnesses to colonial practices, which for centuries have arbitrarily displaced habitats, “scientifically” categorized and exploited species, and led to the death of both humans and plants. Plants carry this history, even if we humans want to deny it.
The exhibition also examines the human desire to enjoy only the aesthetic and psychological benefits of nature by artificially recreating natural elements in manmade environments. Urbanization and technological advances—and attempts to integrate nature into our daily lives while ignoring the complexity of real ecosystems—are driven by political power structures that prioritize economic growth and resource extraction, leading to the overexploitation of resources and ecosystem destruction; the ever-increasing number of natural disasters forebodes the future of palm trees and humanity. As global warming becomes more extreme, palm trees will be able to grow anywhere in the future, but their natural habitats are increasingly threatened by climate change.
What all the contributions to Tired Palm Trees have in common is that their plants are suffering and tired. Symptomatic of the tiredness of a society that cannot find rest even in the soundest sleep, this exhibition aims to form an empathetic view of climate change and the environment by anthropomorphizing them as symbolic trespassers of borders and migratory subjects through the works of eight artists who address some of the many social phenomena surrounding plants.
Supported by the Government of Austria and organized in collaboration with Morocco’s Le Cube – independent art room, this third edition of the exhibition builds on previous editions held at Pavelhaus, Austria (2019) and Le Cube – independent art room, Morocco (2022). Art Sonje Center has invited six artists from these earlier exhibitions, along with Korean artists Mi Jung Shin and Jongwan Jang, to broaden the symbolic interpretation of palm trees from diverse perspectives.
Press release from Art Sonje Center
Image: Jongwan Jang. I Prefer White Wine. 2024. Acrylic gouache, color pencil on Korean paper. 194 x 259.2 cm ⓒJongwan Jang
