KEIRA GREENE
ELLIE KYUNGRAN HEO
MAEVE BRENNAN
BEN RIVERS
Adaptation –
Life before, with, after us
25.02.22 – 22.04.22
A season of artist films convened around the theme of ‘adaptation’. Looking at our increasingly precarious relationship with the environment and non-human animals the films in Adaptation ask several urgent questions: What might we learn from imagining the planet's ecology at a macro- and micro-scopic scale, placing ourselves in the vast web of multi-species interconnectedness? What are the long-term consequences of our abuse of the planet and is our compulsion to intervene, mend and repair in fact tied to a deeper desire for dominion over nature, serving only to cause further damage? Is it now us who must adapt to survive in the fragile niche we have created, and, if it is in fact too late, what might the world look like when we are all but extinct?
In an unmoored, ascending temporal scale the works take the viewer from pre-human, deep geological time – meditating on things in the natural world so small they fall outside our comprehension, yet our very existence depends on them – to a post-anthropogenic future in which a possible last person on earth clings to life in a dying ecosystem.
Installation photographs by Ben Westoby
Film stills courtesy of the artists and Lux, London