“BOTANY OF DESIRE”

Featuring artists Caroline Absher, Lindsay Adams, Camilla Alberti, Hangama Amiri, Bhasha Chakrabarti, Chitra Ganesh, Shyama Golden, Alison Kudlow, Alicia Reyes McNamara, Isabella Mellado, Bianca Nemelc, Devin Osorio, Hilda Palafox, Luján Pérez Hernández, Kelly Shami, Ivana Štulić, Abhishek Tuiwala, Khari Turner, Miko Veldkamp, Letha Wilson.

Curated by Sadaf Padder.

October 14th - November 11th 2023

“Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or eective as to seem a miracle of purpose. It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves o and pure nature begins.” - Michael Pollan, Botany of Desire

Swivel’s alluring group show Botany of Desire explores how certain plants have evolved to gratify human desires - specically for sweetness, beauty, intoxication, control and healing - and, in turn, how plant species have used man to meet their own benet. Given that plants are immobile, they have learned to be the ultimate chemist in order to further their reproduction. The exhibition draws its inspiration from a book of the same title by Michael Pollan, which questions the idea that people are the sole drivers of domestication. Weaving threads from personal histories, the artists of this exhibition share critical representations of ora and vegetation intertwined with lived experiences and family histories. Curator Sadaf Padder extends the original theory by Pollan to contemplate a fth desire - healing.

In lieu of reducing botany to the background, these artists collectively acknowledge intelligence and agency of plant life, unearthing radical compassion through depictions of intimate and reciprocal relationships. Given the growing global climate crisis, resituating our relationship with plants as willing evolutionary partners rather than as pawns is a necessary paradigm shift.

HEALING

The poultice of comfrey leaves that lifts a wasp’s sting from our skin returns us to a quasi-magic world of healing plants from which modern medicine has largely cast us out. Herbal remedies have existed across cultures for longer than agriculture has, and beyond treating physical ailments, humans have imbued these remedial plants with spiritual and metaphorical meanings and purposes in ancient practices and rituals.

SWEETNESS

While anthropologists have found that cultures vary enormously in their liking for bitter, sour, and salty avors, a taste for sweetness appears to be universal. The yearning for sweet avors can be traced back to breastmilk. Sweetness is literally a sensation that starts on the tongue, but it has also long been commensurate with metaphorical fulllment or perfection. Plants that wish to be eaten—like the apple—often manufacture a superabundance of sugars in the esh around their seeds as an ingenious way of exploiting the mammalian sweet tooth. In exchange for fructose, animals provide the seeds with transportation, allowing the plant to expand its range. Plants oering the biggest, sweetest fruits have prospered together and multiplied, evolving into the apple species we see today and shaping the human species we are today. In response, fruits such as the apple “have been sweetened beyond recognition. Figures of tart wildness have been thoroughly domesticated... a cheap, fake sweetness has been substituted for the real thing.” Increasingly, fruits are losing the sweetness race against processed sugar and junk food.

BEAUTY

Does beauty have purpose? While beauty ideals are culturally specic and are in constant ux, qualities like color and symmetry draw attention or indicate health in the process of sexual selection among plants. Attraction from pollinators used to guarantee a plant’s reproductive success, and foragers who were drawn to owers could identify pollinators as a reliable predictor of future food. Often, traits preferred by people render plants less t for the wild. In fact, a mutation that nature would have rejected can prove to be brilliant in an environment shaped by humans.

INTOXICATION

Humans have long observed animals that consume intoxicating plants and have found that toxins can change our experience of consciousness. Chemicals such as nicotine, THC, psilocybin, and caeine can heighten powers of observation and memory or provoke a sense of wonder, transcendence, and freedom.

CONTROL

In the practice of farming and gardening, humans enact a desire for control against the chaos of wilderness. Planting in intelligible rows atters not only our sense of order but also our logic, making weeding and harvesting simpler and more ecient. From the same urge, we introduce monoculture, the slash-and-burn method, and genetic modication to transform the infertile into the fertile, the gradual into the instant, and the inedible into the edible (particularly in the case of the potato). Plants respond to our attempts at industry with abundance: though nature herself never plants in rows, she doesn’t necessarily begrudge us when we do.