A co-production between Halle Nord and Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève.
Curated by Elise Lammer

This exhibition is the outcome of an extended research project on artist, filmmaker, author, and gay rights activist Derek Jarman (UK, 1942–1994), who, a year after being diagnosed HIV-positive in 1986, acquired a fisherman’s cottage in Dungeness, on the south-east coast of Kent. There, he created Prospect Cottage, the house and garden that became a vital site of artistic and horticultural experimentation, where he spent significant time during the last seven years of his life. This remarkable garden, now a cult site for a generation of artists, served as the setting for numerous short and feature films, as well as for his later writings, including his memoir Modern Nature (1991).

For Jarman, as for many artists before and after him, the garden, with its powerful metaphorical charge, became a way to approach the concept of nature through critical inquiry, particularly by tracing its entanglement with colonial and anthropological histories. Defiant Gardens brings together artists whose engagement with the notion of the garden belongs to a utopian, decolonial, and feminist tradition, and who share a vision of nature as a space of emancipation.

More information: halle-nord.ch