Welcome to the opening of the exhibition on 29 October from 5 – 7 pm!

Working across sculpture, sound, installation, scent, and image, the Japan-based Brazilian artist Anais-karenin examines the ways entities acquire functions, meanings, and values within the world. Her practice operates at the boundary between the organic and inorganic, directly challenging colonial-modern frameworks that historically managed and commodified matter as passive subjects of inquiry. Through a precise convergence of sensory matter, she blurs institutional designations to uncover the unresolved, ungrasped expressions of plants and stones.

This critical destabilization is intimately tied to the artist’s lineage of land-workers from the semi-arid Brazilian Sertão. Marked by the historical trauma of the ‘Great Drought’ and environmental migration, her work treats displacement as a site of deep ecological knowledge. Within her practice, situations and conditions of existence are understood as social contracts that actively shape and limit our perception of these entities. Yet, by applying situational operations directly to the matter, she enables them to undergo a transformation. Medicinal plant substances and mineral properties are decoded into sound, scent, or mutable forms, collapsing the distance between language and territory to release an uncontrollable potential to become otherwise.

The exhibition proposes an aesthetic of lingering transition, placing plants-stones in ways that generate new conditions for an expansion of narration. Through this suspension, Plant-stones, otherwise witness these entities in their untamed states, where the process of transformation becomes one of healing, making situated cosmovisions available again.

Anais-karenin evokes the liminal states of plant-stones and investigates the ways colonial-modern projects mobilized them as objects of extractivist geopolitics and semiotics of power. Investigating how language produces worlds and their material consequences, she creates sensorial counter-narratives that activate complex modes of perception through symbols of transformation and continuity, translating herbal and mineral substances into sound, installation, sculpture, image, garden, scent, and performance.

She completed her PhD in Arts from the University of São Paulo (Brazil) and has exhibited in institutions such as Towada Art Center Museum (Japan), Kunstgallerie Villa Merkel (Germany), Museum of Contemporary Art Niterói (Brazil), and The Museum of Modern Art Gunma (Japan), and has been awarded residencies such as the Singapore Art Museum Residency Program and Tokyo Arts & Space, a program from the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Her research was presented at institutions such as Oxford University and the United Nations Conference.