Over the past three weekends, Komplex Gallery has been hosting a series of exhibitions from the ROTU artist collective. Jack Howse went along to check out the final two series of works that are being displayed until Sunday.

By Jack Howse

With COP26 now firmly over, questions turn to what lessons can be learnt and how these can help to shape our futures. This, too, is the central question for ‘(en)countering crisis and re:making futures’ a series of exhibitions that have been taking place in Komplex Gallery on Victoria Road. Repository of the Undercommons, a curator/artist residency, describes the series as: “a way to (re)imagine alternatives + to (re)create cultural codes, messages + values for our future(s)”.

Both works that premier this weekend as part of the exhibition, Fadzai Mwakutuya Rukuvhute’s Umbilical and Verbena Blue Collective’s Gemütlig, play with these ideas of regeneration through an ecological lens.

To view and participate in Gemütlig, you must first enter through a low and narrow entranceway. Once you have struggled through the dark passage, you emerge into a verdant cocoon of teeming flora, mellifluous lyrics and pulsing orbs. The hues of green, from the dark moss that flecks the walls to the yellowed edges of a hanging spider plant, seem a million miles away from the heavy November sky that sits above the gallery.

As I sat on the floor, I considered the questions posed by the artists, Anton Vasiliadis and Ruben San Roman, in the exhibition notes: “can you feel embraced??? would you feel cradled on a green and wet lullaby???”. I certainly felt so in this warm cocoon – but it made me consider whether I did outside this pod, and how natural spaces like this are being decimated everyday.

The luscious space is crisscrossed with green elastic string, allowing the viewer to interact with the installation. Once strung, each string projects an electronically-produced, yet watery sounding, ping. Different coloured lamps and lights also pepper the space, each a different colour but none of them ever green. I saw it as an entanglement of the natural and digital and a comment on how technology and nature can interact in a symbiotic and mutually beneficial manner.

Throughout the installation, different lyrics are narrated which circle the main theme of the exhibition – (en)countering crisis + re:making futures. The visitor is again asked to consider their place within the cocoon and how the modern world can have a healthy (future) relationship with nature.

Umbilical also explores relationships between humans, technology, and nature. Fadzai Mwakutuya presents a number of works in the exhibition, the first being a selection of digitally printed fabrics which uses sadza in the printing process.

Sadza is the staple food of Zimbabwe, where Fadzai is from. As the exhibition notes say, the use of sadza: “both comforts and grounds Fadzai, attaching her to her motherland like an umbilical cord”. The fabrics display a variety of abstract patterns, straddling somewhere between a microscope of the natural world and the inside of a computer matrix.

Fadzai also displays a number of lampshades in the exhibition which use natural materials like seaweed as well as the digitally-printed fabrics. The artist says she has a fetish for lampshades and there are certainly ecosexual elements to the works. Like Gemütlig, Umbilical seems to be questioning how technology and nature can become embroiled.

The exhibition runs until Sunday, more information about it, and ROTU as a whole, can be found here