Join artist Corinne Silva in conversation with Middle Eastern plant expert Sabina Knees for the launch of Silva’s new book Garden State.  Silva’s exhibition of the same title showed at The Mosaic Rooms last year, in Garden State she considers how gardening, like mapping, is a way of allocating territory.

Garden State presents 53 colour plates which trace suburban settlements in Israeli occupied territories.  Between 2010 and 2013, Silva made a series of visits to Israeli occupied territories between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. She travelled across twenty-two Israeli settlements making photographs of public and private gardens. Silva presents this visually rich photographic journey and examines how the gardens in these occupied lands are both material and symbolic evidence of a continuing colonisation.

Silva will be in conversation with Middle Eastern plant expert Sabina Knees, who produced a taxonomical table of ‘colonising plants’ that is featured in the book.

Garden State is the outcome of exhibitions at The Mosaic Rooms and Ffotogallery, co – organised by the UAL Photography and the Archive Research Centre and supported by the London College of Communication.

About the speakers:

Corinne Silva‘s practice is concerned with landscape as a complex interrelation of culture and geography, politics and botany, living beings and inanimate matter. The artist explores these connections through a direct and immediate engagement with the territories she visits, on journeys through Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Recent exhibitions include Garden State at The Mosaic Rooms and Ffotogallery Cardiff, and ReGeneration3, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland and My Sister Who Travels, The Mosaic Rooms, London, UK (2014). Silva is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of the Arts London Photography and the Archive Research Centre at London College of Communication

Sabina Knees is Middle Eastern Plant Botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh and Head of Floristic Research at the Centre for Middle Eastern Plants.

 FREE, rsvp@mosaicrooms.org