Exhibition

BFA Visual and Critical Studies presents “There’s a leaf in my hand,” an exhibition by Spanish Fulbright Postdoc Scholar Dr. Antía Iglesias premiering an interspecies and interactive transmedia installation around nature, relations, and memory. Curated by Ana Isabel Galván García de las Bayonas, the exhibition will be on view from Wednesday, June 4, through Friday, June 27, in the Flatiron Project Space, 133/141 West 21 Street. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, June 5, 6:00 – 8:00pm.

“There’s a leaf in my hand” continues Iglesias’ exploration of the urgent reconfiguration of human and non-human relationships. Whether deconstructing colonial structures of nature representation or engaging in multiple mixed-media co-creations, the artist exposes the collaborative and disruptive potential that emerges from the recombination of plant and human agencies. At the heart of her work lies an intrinsic questioning and entanglement of the art/science divide, calling for creative thinking as a critical and constitutive element of both disciplines and languages.

In “There’s a leaf in my hand,” Iglesias invites us into an event of interspecies affectivity. Drawing from her own history of mutual care with plants, both in her native Galicia and through her migratory experience in the US, the artist urges us to pause and reflect on the impact that action, observation, and contact have on the relationships between interdependent organisms. Within the exhibition, the installation "Lay Here With Me" offers a third space for sensory interaction between humans and plants, through a haptic experience that intertwines bodies and machines, senses and materials, the time of memory and the time of the artwork. Like pieces of a mechanism, like particles of a body, like inhabitants of a forest, Iglesias inaugurates a threshold where the viewer, the artist, and the medium exist in deep symbiosis, intuiting the indescribable form of a world (perhaps) to come.