Growing Like a Tree

Group Show with Katrin Koenning

Ishara Art Foundations new exhibition ‘Growing Like A Tree’ focuses on the regional histories of image-making through a multi-media exploration of place, memory, and culture. Curator Sohrab Hura brings together work from all over the world, including Cambodia, Bangladesh and Germany, in a group exhibition that showcases the work of 14 different artists and collectives, including 2020 Heroine Katrin Koenning.

The included artwork explores ideas of changing cities, collective memory, the environment, public spaces, and the archive, in a collection of works that blur the lines between documentary and fiction, image and object. Using photography as the foundation of a wider artistic tradition that includes video, text and sound installation, the curation of these works suggests an interconnectedness between different contemporary artistic practices and the cultures which inspire them.

Katrin Koenning’s work is informed by documentary photography and focuses on stories and experiences situated in the everyday. She highlights connections within the greater living world, and builds on the narrative possibilities that these connections, and the methods used to record them, invite.

‘Growing Like A Tree’ features an extract of Katrin’s 2015-2017 project ‘Collisions’. In a work that spanned two years and numerous environments, ‘Collisions’ brings together fragments of moving images in a work that responds to a world of acceleration, globalisation, fast burns and extinctions, all gathered with the medium that perhaps best represents this – the phone. Lines between machine, human, and animal blur as Katrin presents the Earth in a frantic, frozen fall.

Other work included by Aishwarya Arumbakkam, Anjali House, Bunu Dhungana, Farah Mulla, Jaisingh Nageswaran, Munem Wasif, Nida Mehboob, Nepal Picture Library, Reetu Sattar, Sarker Protick, Sathish Kumar, Sean Lee, Yu Yu Myint Than, and a citation of Heroine Dayanita Singh along with site-specific interventions by Sohrab Hura.

‘Growing Like A Tree’ is open at Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai until 20^th May 2021. Extended 15th July.

By Melissa Spreadborough