The Secret Life of Plants and Trees
Agil Abdullayev, Tatiana Fiodorova-Lefter, Hori Izhaki

An exhibition of the Büchsenhausen Fellowship Program for Art and Theory 2023–24.
curated by: Andrei Siclodi
with:
Agil Abdullayev
Tatiana Fiodorova-Lefter
Hori Izhaki
EXHIBITION DATES:
24 May – 10 August 2024
KUNSTPAVILLON
Rennweg 8a, 6020 Innsbruck
The concluding exhibition of the Büchsenhausen Fellowship Program for Art and Theory 2023-24 explores today’s growing antagonisms and shifts in identity politics. Decolonial
questioning of (post)Soviet identity formation, queer cruising practices in repressive societies, and the (im)possibility of socio-political identity constructions as an Arab Jew in the
context of Israel-Palestine are central themes that unfold in the respective works with the help of and in dialogue with botanical actors.
Büchsenhausen Fellows 2023-24:
Agil Abdullayev is an interdisciplinary artist from Azerbaijan, manifesting their practice through film, paintings, and performance. The semi-biographical practice of Agil examines the not-well-documented queer history of South Caucasus and how socio-political domination has shaped it in Azerbaijan and other South Caucasian countries. Their films read the queer body as an archive that addresses queer anxieties; often referring to escapism and queer utopia, they aim to create a space for possibilities where representations of queer narratives can be disrupted, re-articulated, and reinvented.
Agil holds a BA of Fine Arts from Nottingham Trent University and took part in the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. They have been awarded by the Prince Claus Foundation and SudKultur Fund and have exhibited at the Liverpool Biennial, The Wrong Biennial, South London Gallery, Photographers’ Gallery, Tate Modern, Asian Art Museum, Peabody Essex Museum, Goethe Institut in Baku and Tbilisi, and MoMA Tbilisi.
https://agilabdullayev.info/
Tatiana Fiodorova-Lefter is an artist, cultural worker, curator, and teacher from the Republic of Moldova. As an artist, she uses a wide variety of media, including drawing, painting, installation, photography, and performance art, makes artist books and realizes interdisciplinary projects. She works with participatory social practices to engage with and comment on contemporary political and social issues. Driven by her interest in social and political history, she focuses on the post-Soviet transition as well as issues of gender and post-Soviet identity, and engages with questions of colonialism and globalization. Positioning herself as a post-socialist subject, the artist relates to a critical discourse for understanding her identity through post-soviet experience in the frame of everyday global coloniality, understood as an integral feature of modernity. According to Fiodorova-Lefter, this subject is placed in a rapidly changing post-capitalist world that has been experiencing colossal, contradictory, and complex transformations for the past three decades. By critically assessing the situation of assigning each person a specific place in the existing world hierarchy, the artist questions her role in this new global world architecture. Since 2008, her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions and festivals across Europe. In 2023 she created the Nomad Bureau for Art Research – a platform and nomadic artist-run space in Chisinau.
www.tatianafiodorova.wordpress.com
https://www.instagram.com/tfiodorova_lefter/
Hori Izhaki is a multidisciplinary artist from Tel Aviv Jaffa, who is currently based in Berlin. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in museums, galleries, festivals and art fairs in the Middle East and around Europe, including the Jewish Museum Berlin, Volkskundemuseum Wien and the CLB Gallery Berlin.
With her art, she arrives in temporal mechanisms, structures and arrangements she builds to fall and fail (like any utopia). Inspired by the mechanisms of sociological phenomena, their grounding in social rituals and the possibility to play with them, she investigates issues of identity in relation to memory (collective as personal), colonialism of the (female) body, its representation and trauma.
For Izhaki, nesting her works between disciplines is a choice aiding interrogation. Embracing the unresolvable question of what starts what, the media emerges from the theme and the theme is born from the media. She works with performance, installation, language, video, sculpture and temporarily emerging communities of participation in the intersection between the natural, the technological and the symbolic.
www.horiizhaki.com/
Location
Kunstpavillon















