‘This Rare Earth – Stories from Below’: Professor Lise Autogena exhibiting work at Artefact festival – February 2018
Professor Lise Autogena’s film work Kuannersuit; Kvanefjeld will be shown at This Rare Earth – Stories from Below (as part of Artefact 2018) at STUK in Leuven, Belgium. The exhibition runs from 13 February to 01 March 2018.
This Rare Earth – Stories from Below is an exhibition and a festival that gives voice to the stories told by geological materials, conflict minerals and -metals, and rare earth elements. The artworks involved focus on the political, economic and ecological implications of their circulation; from mining, processing, and trading, to use, and recycling. They allow us to question what our relation is or can be as humans vis-a-vis these materials.
Specific attention goes out to artist practices going beyond critical reporting, towards an embedded, involved way of relating to the geological turn. They shed light on otherwise invisible themes, create new narratives, or offer alternative concepts that can help us in creating a different understanding of or perspective on the global, political, economic and ecological tales of extraction and trade.
This Rare Earth – Stories from Below at STUK Onthaal
3000 Leuven, Belgium
13 February 2018 – 01 March 2018
Opening event: 13 February, 7.30PM – 11PM
Find out more here.
With works by: Otobong Nkanga, Ilana Halperin, Julian Charrière, Justin Bennett, Cecilia Jonsson, Prabhakar Pachpute & Rupali Patil, Maarten Vanden Eynde, Unknown Fields, Füsun Türetken, Lise Autogena & Joshua Portway, Susanne Kriemann, Lara Almarcegui, Sissel Marie Tonn, Milo Rau, Ursula Biemann & Mo Diener, Egill Sæbjörnsson, Kirstie van Noort & Xandra van der Eijk.
Curated by: Karen Verschooren (STUK) & Ils Huygens (Z33). Artefact is an initiative of the Province Vlaams-Brabant i.c.w. Stad Leuven, and is supported by KU Leuven in the context of the policy guideline ‘art and science’.
Kuannersuit; Kvanefjeld, 2016 (27 minutes) portrays the region of Kvanefjeld in southern Greenland – site of the richest rare earth mineral resources in the world, and home to one of the world’s largest deposits of uranium. The film explores a Greenland divided on the issue of uranium mining as a means of gaining autonomy, social progress and financial independence. Traditional ways of living from the land and the sea do not sit easily with the Greenland’s government’s plans for big investments by foreign mining companies. The film portrays the difficult decisions and trade-offs faced by a culture seeking to escape a colonial past and define its own identity in a globalised world and will be introduced by a paper by the artists.
Professor Lise Autogena is an artist and a Professor of Cross-Disciplinary Art at the Cultural Communication and Computing Research Institute at Sheffield Hallam University. Find out more about her work here.