A Feral Commons

This global co-commission project by Alserkal Advisory unites cultural districts in Dubai, Johannesburg and Kingston. It aims to use the collective power of peer art organisations globally to respond to the urgent global issues of our time, inviting participants to renew their current perspectives and learnings and exploring how artists can rise to new challenges, create new models of the commons and new ways of living. Each project will stand alone as a site-specific exhibition and will be accompanied by a programme that engages with local communities to further explore the theme and questions.

Through their site-specific public artworks, A Feral Commons invites artists to examine the often unrecognised co-dependency and openended collaborations between human and more-than-human beings. Each artist will develop a new, site-specific public art installation in response to the central theme of climate change, uniting cultural districts from the GCDN across three continents.

At Alserkal Avenue, Muhannad Shono is studying unexpected ecologies that are thriving unnoticed in the urban environment of Al Quoz, an industrial centre of Dubai and home to Alserkal Avenue. More widely, his multidisciplinary practice is catalysed and structured by story, harnessing the power of narrative by creating and contesting personal, collective and historical truths.

Camille Chedda works with themes of post-colonial identity in Jamaica, the Caribbean, and the African diaspora. These interests have brought her to look at land and material: the legacies of place and the materials found within them. For Kingston Creative, Chedda is working with the Lower South Camp Park in Kingston, a public area which for various socio-political reasons has become neglected and overgrown with wild plants, especially the ubiquitous Mexican Creeper more popularly known in Jamaica as the Rice and Peas Bush, an edible and medicinal plant and a magnet for bees and pollinating insects.

Io Makandal’s artistic practice is concerned with ecologies in the urban environment, in relation to human activity and human’s obsession with development. Much of her work involves working with natural materialities and processes that manifest into living sculptures, interventions, installations, photography and drawing.