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The Bass announces the opening of Jamilah Sabur: The Harvesters, an exhibition of new works by the artist on view through April 30, 2023.
Working across various disciplines including performance, visual artwork, video and installation, Jamilah Sabur explores the intersections of geology, climatology, geography and memory with dynamics of power and capitalism.
For The Harvesters, Sabur weaves a series of interconnected works into an exhibition that confronts the labor of extraction, positioning the embodiment of physical labor and the mining of geological materials alongside extreme global weather patterns, metaphysics and planetary atmospheric shifts. Sabur examines climate change, particularly long-term changes in temperatures and weather patterns, as an expression of geological rhythms and economies.
The title of the exhibition is a reference to the eponymous Pieter Bruegel painting from 1565. In Bruegel’s painting we see adults harvesting wheat in the foreground, while a sport game is played by youths in the mid-ground and an active bay filled with ships is in the background. For Sabur the painting is of particular resonance as the central focus is the late summer’s heat. Sabur found herself reexamining the painting in context of the current energy crisis and the record-breaking heatwave the planet has experienced this year.
Sabur uses the theme of harvesting as double entendre to connect with her ongoing interest in mining and mineral extraction, especially in the context of post-colonial states and their conception of boundaries. Another idea present in the Bruegel painting and explored in Sabur’s work is movement, the physical labor of harvesting, the worker’s sweeping scythe to cut wheat, expressing rhythmic movements of embodiment. In one painting this figure is paired with a parabolic shape, referring to the Ross by wave, a planetary wave within the Earth’s Ocean and atmosphere formed as a result of the rotation of the planet.
Taking the subject matter of the painting as a starting point, Sabur asks us to see what historical narratives fail to provide, inviting viewers to consider what is left in the margins. Sabur offers viewers a glimpse of the tenuous cultural and geographic connections that knit together and demonstrate a basic metaphysical human truth: humanity goes beyond material capital.
Learn more about the exhibition at thebass.org/art/the-harvesters.
