LEYLA MAJERI | DON’T BLAME US IF WE GET PLAYFUL

March 10 to April 14 2018

In a garden, the more we focus on understanding, interpreting, maintaining, delimiting and controlling the spirit of a thing that escapes and surprises us, the more blurred the distinction becomes between the act of cultivation and the cultivated object. The garden is a space in which various energies and intentions are at work and where human and non-human activities, including those of organisms, chemicals, waste and climate, are deeply entangled and merged. So much so that plants and people are transformed there and, so to speak, "reciprocally cultivated". In this sense, Leyla Majeri grasps the garden as a performative site, where fantasies directed at and arising from nature take shape and evanesce. Her project, "Don't Blame Us If We Get Playful", is a sensitive and highly fanciful discourse, reflecting the complexity and ambiguity of our relationships to the "other". Here, the residue of ideologies opposing nature and culture serves as a substratum, like ruins, for imagining new gardens, dissident landscapes, anti-Edens.

Graduating master’s student in visual and media arts (MFA), UQAM.