Uriel Orlow seeks to make audible and visible what history tries to occlude. The Reconnaissance (Paused Retrospect) and The Voice-Over, both drawn from Unmade Film (2011-2014), involve a tour without visuals and a filmed excursion without sound. Their sites are two emptied Palestinian villages outside Jerusalem: Deir Yassin, whose inhabitants were driven out or killed during a massacre carried out by Zionist paramilitary groups in 1948, and nearby Lifta. Here, vacant buildings and plants tell of witnessing and the need for justice.
Five projects in the Exhibition develop Orlow’s dialogue with plants. In Herbarium Ghosts (2016-2026), he photographs outlines that pressed plants have left on covering paper, a ghostly evocation of colonial classification and ongoing extinction. Holding the Mountain (2026), a large-scale drawing mounted on a tile panel, celebrates vetiver, used in the Himalayas to bind slopes at risk from climate change. The short videos in Dedication II (2021/2026) address the symbiotic system between roots and fungi by which trees communicate.
Outdoor projects explore La Biennale as a nexus of human-plant exchange. Botanical Biennale (2026), a series of silkscreen-printed billboards, maps the origins of what grows in and around La Biennale sites. In Reveries of Collective Walkers (Reading to Plants) (2022-ongoing), Orlow invites visitors to read aloud to plants. What might a plant like to hear? Orlow beckons us toward botanical decolonialisation as ethical action and ecological repair.
—Cherry Smyth
