Qissa Reviews: Exploring Gender and Ecology at the Barbican Centre

Re/Sisters opens with a stunning series from Simryn Gill documenting sea and coastal pollution through photographs of a small coastal town in Malaysia. If you look at an individual image, you realise it is something quite unsightly, such as a plastic bag swinging from a mangrove branch. But if you look at the collection of 29 photos as a whole then they become something beautiful. The rich colours (emphasised by the Ilfochrome paper they’re printed on) and positioning in each photograph makes them something you would want to hang on your wall. Another series from Gill is also included in the exhibition, ‘Eyes and Storms’, which show mines, dams, remote lakes and more through aerial photography.

I am having to resist the urge here to give you a step-by-step guide around the exhibition because, truly, there was not a dud work in there. It has been so carefully curated and the various subsections - with titles like ‘Extractive Economies/Exploding Ecologies’ and ‘Reclaiming the Commons’ - help to further contextualise each work. So, instead, some more favourites…

Taloi Havini’s ‘Habitat’, a three-channel video installation, was incredibly immersive. The films focus on Agata, an elderly indigenous matriarch and landowner in Papua New Guinea and on Panguna, the largest open-pit mine in the world (at the time of its opening). The films run simultaneously next to each other and manage to move from moments of peace and contemplation to a heightened and frenetic pace where you get a sense of urgency and panic. The colours are incredibly vivid, contrasting the lush green of the landscape with the blue toxic run-off from the mine. 

In a section on protest, alongside images from Greenham Common and the Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice, there is a fantastic collection of work from environmental artist Agnes Denes. In 1982, Denes planted 8,000 square metres of wheat in Battery Park Landfill in New York City, an area of prime real estate. Planted to protest the ‘misplaced priorities’ of capitalism, the resulting photographs are a stunning example of art as direct activism. Denes gave away the entire harvest, rather than materially gaining from it, further highlighting her desire to celebrate the earth’s generative potential.

The most moving for me was the work of Helène Aylon. Around 1980, Aylon created a radical piece of protest art by gathering toxic soil from nuclear military sites and depositing it outside major institutions of power across the US. The exhibition includes photographs, maps and promotional materials for Aylon’s work. A very different but equally impressive piece was that of Mónica de Miranda. Much more recent (2022), her work ‘Salt Island’ explores Europe’s colonial past through a Black ecofeminist lens. Five photographic prints are beautifully embroidered to depict a lush island landscape.

Re/Sisters is truly international in scope. We hear from women and non-binary people from around the world and it really feels like we’re witnessing experiences from across the breadth of society. We see black and white images from Flint, Michigan about the man-made water crisis gorgeously juxtaposed with black and white images from the Chipko movement in India of women embracing nature, both metaphorically and physically, in the form of tree-hugging.

You need plenty of time to explore this exhibition. There are videos, photos, installations and sound works: it is worth dedicating plenty of time to. The themes explored are all incredibly important and timely, from women being denied access to land (such as in Fay Godwin’s work and similar to ideas expressed in Rachel Hewitt’s book, In Her Nature), to those that explicitly link the female body with nature, such as Tee A. Corinne’s powerful photographs. As we see news of climate change and its impacts on a daily basis, Re/Sisters gives a real sense of the myriad of ways in which communities and individuals are affected. The exhibition programme itself claims it is about the oppression of women, and it is. But it is also about the women who are fighting for change. Those who will not stand back and watch our planet be destroyed. Those who choose to witness, document and mobilise.