Forest Times

Forest Times brings together two major recent projects by artist Uriel Orlow, Reading Wood (Backwards), 2022, and Forest Futurism, 2024, in which plants are simultaneously political actors, witnesses to the past and guides for the future. With Reading Wood (Backwards), Orlow turns his attention to the entanglements of human and non-human actors in order to read the archive against the grain, asking what would restituting to the natural world mean, while with Forest Futurism, it is the life of plants themselves, outside or beyond the time of human history, that takes center stage. Working across film and 3D modelling, the latter project connects the palaeontological deep time of tree fossils with future forest modelling to imagine, with the voice of children, more-than-human scenarios from the point of view of trees. Set in South Tyrol/Alto Adige and conducted in dialogue with a palaeobotanist and climate scientists, the project forges connections between local scientific research and global climate concerns and the urgent need for alternative visions of the future.

Uriel Orlow (b. 1973 in Zurich, lives and works between Lisbon, London and Zurich) is an artist whose practice is often in dialogue with other disciplines and people. For almost ten years, plants have been a regular focus of his work, both witnesses to and protagonists of specific histories that they enable us to uncover or interpret differently, whether it be the blind spots of our colonial heritage, or our relationship to the natural world. His installations focus on specific locations, micro-histories and forms of haunting. Working across photography, film, drawing, and sound his works bring different image-regimes and narrative modes into correspondence. He is the winner of the Grand Prix suisse d’art /Prix Meret Oppenheim 2023 and the CF Meyer Prize in 2020. In 2017, he received the Sharjah Biennale Prize. He also received the City of Zurich Prize in 2015 and three Swiss Art Awards (2008, 2009, 2012). His work has been presented at major international survey exhibitions, including the 54th Venice Biennale, Manifesta 9 and 12 in Genk and Palermo, as well as in numerous museums, galleries, and film festivals. He teaches at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), at the University of Westminster, London and at Maumaus, Lisbon. 

This publication is realized on the occasion of Uriel Orlow's solo exhibition Forest Futurism on view at Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts Lausanne from 27 September to 2024 to 16 February 2025.

Uriel Orlow. Forest Times. Edited by Nicole Schweizer. With artworks and texts by Uriel Orlow, essays by Lucia Pietroiusti and Ana Teixeira Pinto, and an introduction by Nicole Schweizer, curator of contemporary art at MCBA, Lausanne. Design by In the Shade of a Tree, Paris.