Power has many different meanings. There is of course social power, political
power, juridical power but there is also
the botanical power of plants to act
within ecological systems but also
change human health, humans perception,
and humans mind-frame.
When I saw the
building and the galleries for the first
time it was immediately obvious to me
that this location is unique, this park
is unique and I wanted to do a show that
both reacts to the park itself but also
to its geographical location in one of
the most unequal boroughs in Europe so I
think both elements sort of combined to
create the show.
The so-called Actual Reality [OS] app
is an augmented reality app
which enables you to see actual reality
as we call it. It gives you a view of the
Serpentine Galleries building distorted
in relation to local inequality data for
example data relating to wealth
inequality to housing and other social
issues are being mapped onto the gallery
in real time to give you an impression a
visualization of what the social reality
in this area really looks like, that's
one aspect
Within the gallery there is different
aspects merging into one another.
First of all there are testimonies by people
from the research partners - the NGOs we
have been working with to collect the
data and people are telling us stories
about, for example, of accessing this park
under the influence of austerity.
How does it feel if you happen to be a
disabled person, for example? How does the
park look like from the perspective of
Domestic Workers? So, many of these
stories have been collected and they are
merged with another series of works
which are video sculptures which show
flowers that have been predicted into
the future by artificial intelligence.
So these are basically future plans which
do not yet exist and which have a lot of
medicinal but also ecological properties
which are sort of peculiar and apply to
the situation for me those strands are
not really that different - they merge
into one another and provide different
views of the Gallery and of the park.
The exhibition Power lants is based on
an idea of a ruderal future garden an
idea of an ecosystem that emerges out of
human disruption or in the wake of a
disaster.
As we walk around we see the
use of augmented reality through an
application called Power Plants OS that
visitors can download on their mobile
devices or that they can experience
through the many suspended iPads in the
gallery space.
We discover the healing and medicinal powers
and political powers of the plants that are blooming
out of the scaffold structures and so we
enter yet again another dimension that
is revealed to us through the lens of
the artist and through the experience of
augmented reality.
