Flowers are Documents — Arrangement I and II gathers and juxtaposes the positions of various artists whose ongoing interest in the subject of flower arrangement opens out into investigations of several parallel fields of research. Drawing on this traditional ‘theme’ in painting and responding to the landscape of the South Tyrol with its rooted and blooming floricultural industry, the exhibition proposes practices that focus on and problematize notions of decoration and ornament, the ephemeral and the marginal. Bouquets and ikebana become agents that make it possible to move alongside historical events and extreme presents so as to address issues like decolonization, legality, cultural identity and placemaking. At the same time they question what a document is by offering oblique ways of understanding both the nature of ‘the exhibit’ and the act of exhibiting itself. 

Curators

Emanuele Guidi