2. Garden State
The Mosaic Rooms
14 May—20 June
11am—6pm
The Mosaic Rooms, 226 Cromwell Road, SW5 0SW

Coinciding with this year’s Chelsea Flower Show and London Festival of Architecture, we are pleased to present a free photography exhibition Garden State by Corinne Silva. Offering an unexpected view on gardening, the show comprises photographic and sound installations exploring Israel’s suburban gardens, parks and public places. Silva encourages visitors to view gardening not simply as the act of nurturing a plot of land, but as something potentially far more sinister: a tool used in aggressive state expansion, territory marking and occupation.
In this exhibition, Silva explores what gardening might represent in the context of Israel’s contemporary colonisation of Palestinian territories.
Garden State comprises two ambitious installations, created during a series of trips to sites between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River from 2010 and 2013. Wounded (2013) is a series of nine photographs, taken shortly after a devastating fire in the Carmel Forest in Northern Israel, accompanied by sound recordings made by the artist as she pushed her way through the waist-high foliage that had grown in its place three years later. Only a small percentage of Israel’s forests are natural, when the Aleppo pine forest was first planted, other indigenous flora was pushed out. This immersive audio-visual installation presents the destruction of this national park as a reversal of the Israeli state’s re-creation and occupation of this landscape.