San Mei Gallery presents Chaos is a Flower, a new exhibition by Libyan artist Tawfik Naas featuring a newly commissioned body of work including sculpture, wall and installation-based artworks.

Tawfik Naas’s interdisciplinary practice looks to create environments that offer alternative frameworks for understanding historical trauma, drawing on cosmological and ecological perspectives.

This exhibition in particular focuses on the troubled history of the ‘Great Manmade River’, a government-led infrastructure system initiated in the late 1980s by the then-Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. The Great Manmade River was designed to bring fresh water from underground fossil aquifers in the Sahara to the populous coastal regions of Libya. Often described as the world's largest irrigation project, the Great Manmade River aimed to provide water, security and agricultural development by transporting vast quantities of fossilised water that had accumulated thousands of years earlier when the Sahara had been home to a lush and temperate climate. However, the project produced a myriad of unintended consequences that caused distress and trauma to individuals and communities involved, including Naas’ own family who migrated soon thereafter.

Naas assembles historical details, personal images and symbolic references from this narrative using a methodology he refers to as a ‘post eco-cosmic review’ that amalgamates both cosmological and ecological perspectives. In his work Sepal, Petal, for example, Naas transposes a found image of fossilised water erupting from beneath the desert ground following a NATO bombing in 2012 onto the outer protective layer of a jacket. From this violent geopolitical act, Naas highlights the water’s agency against the hubristic forces of human extraction, an explosion that he likens to a blossoming – a stem protruding from the ground.

Chaos is a Flower turns away from linear understandings of historical events and collective trauma that position history within the limited framework of anthropocentric perception, inspired by the morphology of germinating plants as a symbol of resilience and hope. Rather than remaining within the historical confines of what he calls the event of ‘geohydrotrauma’, Naas instead offers more cosmological conceptions of time in order to expand the possibilities for rewriting histories through the regenerative and restorative lens of deep time and deep ecology. If trauma can be understood as a repetitive bind in which its victims become forever “stuck” within the traumatic event, the exhibition offers a speculative environment alive to moments of transformation and healing.

Private view

San Mei Gallery is pleased to host a joint private view on Thursday 1 February from 6-8pm, for both Tawfik Naas’ exhibition as well as an exhibition in our window space by Phineas Harper. Drinks are kindly provided by Brixton Brewery.

Installation Views

Events

Environment Making: Tawfik Naas & Munesu Mukombe

Thursday 25 April, 7-9pm

Community Coffee Morning

Thursday 2 May 2024, 10-11:30am

Tender Xchange: Bloom 2 Perish (LOOPED)

Saturday 11 May, 1:30 - 4:30pm

Similar Beginnings: Walk and Talk in Myatt’s Fields

Saturday 18 May 2024, 1-4pm

Press Releases

Limited edition artworks

Reading list

This reading list of books, articles and videos has been compiled by Tawfik Naas in conjunction with his exhibition, expanding on its themes and references.

Axer, Eva, and Shields, Ross. “The Seed of an Idea, the Idea of a Seed: Goethe’s Urpflanze in the 21st Century”. The Philosophical Life of Plants, 2022. https://www.plantphilosophy.org.uk/plants-and-philosophy-in-the-present/the-seed-of-an-idea-the-idea-of-a-seed-goethes-urpflanze-in-the-21st-century/

Brown, Thomas J. “Cosmic Influences- Magical Egypt”. Youtube, 31 December 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLJj1ipGyH4

Brown, Thomas Joseph. “Quaternity”. 22 April 2015. http://thomasbrown.org/quaternity/

Broecker, Wallace Smith. How to Build a Habitable Planet: The Story of Earth from the Big Bang to Humankind. Princeton University Press, 2012.

Gábor, Zemplén. “Form as Movement in Goethe’s ‘The Metamorphosis of Plants’”. Technical University of Budapest, 1998, http://hps.elte.hu/~zemplen/goethemorph.html

Marder, Michael. “The Sense of Seeds, or Seminal Events” in Environmental Philosophy, vol. 12, no. 1 (Spring 2015), 87-98.

Moynihan, Thomas. “Cosmic Foliage, Astral Photoenergy and ‘Plant-People’”. The Philosophical LIfe of Plants, 2022. https://www.plantphilosophy.org.uk/histories-of-plant-thinking/cosmic-foliage-astral-photoenergy-and-plant-people/

Naas, Tawfik and Kumbirai Makumbe, “Episode 1: Tawfik Naas & Kumbirai Makumbe”. SET Radio presents: All Purpose Filla, 21 February 2024, https://shows.acast.com/all-purpose-filler/episodes/episode-1-tawfik-naas-kumbirai-makumbe

Quicho, Alex et al, eds. Meet Me in the Present: Documents and their Afterlives. Royal College of Art, 2017.

Steinmetz, Katy. “This Is Where the Word ‘History’ Comes From.” Time, 23 June 2017.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. “Cosmic Life”. In Writings in Time of War, trans. René Hague, Harper & Row Publishers, 1968.

Support

This exhibition and its associated programme of events has been supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and from The Henry Moore Foundation.

Drinks at the opening preview are kindly provided by Brixton Brewery.