LONDON — The tradition of landscape photography is entwined with a patriarchal settler-colonial perspective. As a large-bodied, queer Chicana woman, Laura Aguilar subverts this context through her Nature Self-Portrait series (1996). The small black and white images present her nude form positioned among boulders and trees, revealing parallels between the landscape and the body that does not conform to conventional standards.
These works are emblematic of RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology at London’s Barbican Art Gallery. The exhibition draws out the systemic links between the oppression of women and the anthropogenic destruction of the planet, indicating how the exploitative extraction of the earth suggests a widespread patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist mindset. In particular, RE/SISTERS seeks to platform work by artists from the Global Majority and Indigenous peoples, pointing to pervasive environmental racism and how care for the planet has been divided along both gendered and racialized lines — which are also frontlines of the resistance.
Aguilar’s self-portraits highlight how bodies, landscapes, and bodies within landscapes are coded with racialized, gendered, and socioeconomic associations. At the same time, in presenting both body and landscape as spaces of equal and interwoven beauty, the artist mobilizes her multivalent identity, asserting her right to access natural spaces and to express a relationship with a territory from which she is systematically excluded.
In “Nature Self-Portrait #5” (1996), Aguilar faces away from the camera, looking out across a large open field. Standing among a calligraphic composition of dead tree branches, she reaches her hands to the sky, stretching her fingers out like twigs. The contours and dimples of her body echo the gnarled, dry trunk, while the branches cast deep shadows over her skin, the fall of light and texture suggesting an intimate correlation between person and plant. There is a compelling (and carefully crafted) casualness to the work; the slanting horizon line recalls a snapshot, while also cleverly forming a perpendicular cross with Aguilar’s tilted body. Although the artist was struggling with depression when she took this photograph, the image appears defiantly joyful, expansive, and carefree.
These quietly confident images suggest a profound connection between body and earth. This is conceptual ground long eschewed by many feminist thinkers since the post-1970s decline of the ecofeminist movement, perhaps from fear of reinforcing patriarchal associations between women and so-called “nature.” However, the work on gender and ecology in RE/SISTERS suggests that it is time to re-examine and re-engage with ecofeminism.
Aguilar, like many other artists in the exhibition, rejects a simplistic binary feminization of nature, instead adopting a nuanced notion of the earth as a matrix of fertility, unruliness, and oppression. Throughout, the show emphasizes how the alignment of women and Indigenous communities with nature has been exploited by capitalist-colonial forces. However, there is also a sense of how this alignment has produced a radical politics of care, resistance, and protest. For instance, the exhibition juxtaposes images of anti-nuclear protest at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the 1980s with Pamela Singh’s contemporaneous photographs of women resisting the felling of trees in India during the Chipko movement.
As the introductory wall text states, RE/SISTERS explores “the connections between gender and environmental justice as indivisible parts of a global struggle to address the power structures that threaten our ecosphere.” The exhibition is particularly effective where it uses themes of fluidity and queerness to consider alternatives to the rigid hierarchies of patriarchal systems. For instance, in a series of powerful photo performances, queer Indigenous artist Uýra uses experimental drag to form human-animal hybrids in an interrogation of interspecies relationships.
Another key example is Anne Duk Hee Jordan’s film installation “Ziggy and the Starfish” (2022), which sets the sexual activities of hermaphroditic marine animals to a soundtrack from vintage erotic films. The playful film highlights both the familiarity and the wonderful strangeness of this underwater world, crafting parallels between gender fluidity and the subversively porous boundaries of interspecies kinship.
RE/SISTERS demands an unusual degree of engagement from the viewer. This is a text-heavy exhibition presenting a series of challenging ideas that may be unfamiliar to many, such as the labor of ecological care and intersectional theories around environmental racism. However, the exhibition rewards close attention with a rich and complicated narrative, one that ultimately places woman and other marginalized communities at the center of both the climate crisis and the social justice movement, as those most oppressed and — more hopefully — as key members of the resistance.
RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology continues at Barbican Art Gallery (Silk Street, London, England) though January 14. The exhibition was curated by Alona Pardo, assisted by Colm Guo-Lin Peare, with advisory from Kathryn Yusoff and Suzanne Dhaliwal.
