Conflation of nature and politics

 

Art work © Zoe Leonard / Courtesy the artist / Galerie Gisela Capitain / Hauser & Wirth

From the New Yorker: 

Since 2016, the American artist Zoe Leonard has taken hundreds of photographs at the border of Mexico and the U.S., following the route of a body of water that divides the two countries for twelve thousand miles, known alternately as the Río Bravo and the Rio Grande (and by at least five ancestral names, in Pueblo and Navajo). The exquisitely installed exhibition “Excerpts from ‘Al río / To the River,’ ” on view at Hauser & Wirth through Oct. 29, offers only a glimpse of Leonard’s epic project—ten works consisting of fifty-six black-and-white pictures, hanging singly and in sequences on the walls—but it conveys her rare balancing act of poetics and politics. You might call Leonard’s approach concerned conceptualism, as seen in a quartet of near-abstractions portraying lines raked in dirt, a tactic used by ice to capture the footprints of migrants. These striations are echoed in five views of irrigation canals, attended by flocks of birds (above, in an untitled detail, dated 2020/2022). Leonard’s quiet vistas run counter to sensationalist media coverage of borderland conflict. Her camera lingers on landscape, not people, who appear in only six images here, as distant figures enjoying a day at the beach on a riverbank in Ciudad Juárez, under the omnipresent eye of surveillance apparatus.

From Hauser & Wirth

About the exhibition

Following the river’s course from the border cities of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico, Leonard considers the conflation of, and boundaries between, nature and politics as they manifest in the landscape.

‘Al río / To the River’ is structured through ‘passages,’ sequences of photographs that impart a sense of movement. Pointing to the dynamism of the river, Leonard groups images so that the topography and communities depicted invite associations and interpretations from the viewer.

The artist depicts the river and surrounding borderlands with an eye for the complexity of the various ecosystems, communities, and histories that converge at the river—from families swimming off the riverbank at Ciudad Juárez, to helicopters and border patrol vehicles on sentry; and from dams and irrigation canals, to bridges and boundary markers.