The Echo of an Ancient Form of Knowledge

2021, Edgar Calel

Gallery label, April 2025

[no title]

1970s, Unknown woman artist, Chile

This work is one of a group of textile works in Tate’s collection by unknown Chilean female artists (Tate T14998–T15017). Known as arpilleras, which literally means ‘burlap’ in Spanish, these historic patchworks represent a popular form of artistic expression and political resistance that emerged in Latin America in the twentieth century. They were created in the 1970s by women from Chile’s most economically underprivileged population. Generally the artists remained anonymous because of the political subject matter of their work.

Untitled (A Map of the British Empire in America)

2021, Firelei Báez

Baratjala

2020, Noŋgirrŋa Marawili

Baratjala 2020 is a large vertical painting, over two metres tall, made with earth pigments and recycled print-cartridge toner on stringybark. It depicts waves crashing against partially submerged boulders while lightning strikes across the magenta background, merging with the sea spray of the waves. Marawili is a senior artist working in Yirrkala in northeast Arnhem Land in Australia’s Northern Territory, in the Yolŋu artistic practice of painting with what is found on the land, including discarded printer cartridges. Consistent with the artist’s work, Baratjala shows how Marawili upholds the Yolŋu philosophy that ‘if you paint the land you should use the land’ (22nd Biennale of Sydney: Nirin, exhibition catalogue, 2020, p.242). Along with the bark, the distinctive magenta hue comes from spent printer-ink cartridges that she salvages locally, a practice that alludes to the changes in the local environment but also maintains the Yolŋu sustainable artistic tradition, which is consistent with custodianship responsibilities, including care of the land. Marawili began using salvaged printer ink in 2018, marking a significant shift in her practice.

Amahubo

2018, Buhlebezwe Siwani

Amahubo (meaning ‘Psalm’ in Zulu) is a colour video with sound that can be shown either as a single-channel projection or a three-channel projection; in the latter version it is projected onto a specially constructed relief depicting a mountain landscape on the wall. It captures a ritual performed by a group of eight Black women dressed in white, filmed in alternating aerial and ground views upon the red soil of a wine farm in the landscape around Cape Town, South Africa. The women perform a choreographic ritual and embark upon a symbolic journey, also appearing beside a white colonial-era church. Their clothes evoke the white robes of the traditional South African healer, the Isangoma, as well as the robes worn by members of the Zion or African Apostolic church – a hybrid, colonial form of Christian worship founded at the end of the nineteenth century. They wear a red cape with a Christian cross sewn at the back. The colours of these robes are symbolic: white and red connoting transition or transformation.

Dust Storms at Noon on the R34 Between Welkom and Hennenman, Free State I

2007, printed 2011, Santu Mofokeng

Mofokeng’s work draws links between historical trauma and what he calls ‘mutations in nature’. In his series Climate Change, he traces the damage caused by South Africa’s history of mining and abandoned industrial progress. These photographs document land turning into desert, flooding and polluted soil. They also point to the effects of massive carbon emissions on the entire planetary ecosystem. ‘I’m saying: this is what we’re all afraid of’, he commented.

Gallery label, June 2021

Landscape of Longing

1997–9, Saleem Arif Quadri

Landscape of Longing refers to Arif Quadri’s interest in spiritual quests and journeys. It evokes a map seen from above. Arif Quadri describes the work as ‘a celebration of life with all its inexplicable mysteries’. He relates the painted forms to the sinuous strokes of Islamic calligraphy. The shapes between and around each form are important to the artist. They suggest figurative elements such as female and male figures, or pods and birds. Arif Quadri is influenced by texts ranging from Sufi writings to work by Dante, the 13th century Italian poet.

Gallery label, June 2021

Ligurian Sea

1993, Hiroshi Sugimoto

The experience of contemplating the sea transcends specific time and place in these near-abstract photographs. Although they seem almost Romantic in their evocation of landscape, Sugimoto has said: 'When I look at nature I see the artificiality behind it. Even though the seascape is the least changed part of nature, population and the resulting pollution have made nature into something artificial'.

Gallery label, August 2004

Ntang

1990, Emily Kam Kngwarray

Emily Kam Kngwarray’s artworks embody her lived experience and cultural connections to her Ancestral lands in Australia. She translated this knowledge into vibrant batiks and later into monumental paintings on canvas. Kngwarray layered motifs representing the plants, animals and geological features of the desert around her. This painting refers to ntang – the numerous, small, edible seeds of the alyatywereng grass that grow in Alhalker Country, where she was born. The seeds can be husked and ground into seed cakes. The ecosystem of Alhalker is typical of the arid zone of central Australia. It includes low-lying ridges, rocky outcrops, woodlands and undulating sandplains, some permanent waterholes and watercourses. Alhalker is home to the many plants and animals that inspired Kngwarray’s artworks.

Gallery label, June 2025

Mount Holyoke

1987, Vija Celmins

Mount Holyoke is a one-colour etching of black ink on white paper depicting a starry night sky, dated 1987 and inscribed with the artist’s proof number 12/12 at the bottom left corner of the print, and signed by the artist at the bottom right. Artist’s proofs are identical in appearance to the numbered edition but are usually printed beforehand with the artist and publisher retaining most, if not all, of the proofs. It was printed in collaboration with the master printmaker Doris Simmelink, who has been involved with the production of many Vija Celmins prints. The star-filled composition of this print, as is the case with the majority of Vija Celmins’s drawings, prints and paintings, is based on a found astronomical photograph rather than direct observation of the night sky. The artist began work on the etching plate which would be used to edition this print in 1986 while in residency at the printmaking workshop of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. However, as the art historians Richard Field and Ruth Fine have noted, ‘several months of further work in the artist’s studio were required before it was completed’ (Field and Fine 1987, p.60). This comment refers to the print Untitled Galaxy, an identical etching in an edition of ten that is dated 1986, a year prior to the date of Mount Holyoke. It is likely that the artist decided to reuse the etching plate to print and publish another edition, renaming the work after the place where it was conceived and developed.

Primitive

2009, Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Primitive is a multiple screen video installation, created specifically for display within a gallery, by Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. It consists of seven videos of differing durations in which the history of the border town of Nabua, in northeast Thailand, is re-imagined as an elusive science fiction ghost story rooted in Thai folklore. The work comprises eight projections, since one of the videos, Primitive which gives the work its name, is shown on two synchronised screens. The seven videos are: Primitive (duration 29 minutes 34 seconds), Nabua (duration 9 minutes 11 seconds), Making of the Spaceship (duration 28 minutes 13 seconds), A Dedicated Machine (duration 1 minute), An Evening Shoot (duration 4 minutes 10 seconds), I'm Still Breathing (music video, duration 11 minutes) and Nabua Song (music video, duration 4 minutes 12 seconds). Nabua, situated where the Mekong River divides Thailand from Laos, was historically the scene of considerable racial strife and violence. From the 1960s until the early 1980s it was a ‘red zone’ where the Mao-influenced Communists hid in the jungle. The Thai army curbed the communist insurgent farmers through physical and psychological abuse and murder. The town also harbours an ancient legend about a widow ghost who would abduct any man who entered her empire, earning it the nickname ‘widow town’. Weerasethakul transforms the town into one of men, the teenage male descendants of the farmer communists, freed from the widow ghost’s empire. These teenagers fabricate their own memories and build a new world, manufacturing a spaceship in the ricefields.

Parallel I-IV

2012–4, Harun Farocki

In Vivian’s Garden

2016, Rosalind Nashashibi

In Vivian’s Garden is an abstract landscape painting made in 2016 in direct response to the process and environment which Nashashibi experienced during the making of her film Vivian’s Garden 2017 in Guatemala. The film is also in Tate’s collection (Tate T15055); over thirty minutes, it depicts the relationship between two Swiss /Austrian émigré artists who are mother and daughter – Elisabeth Wild (born 1922) and Vivian Suter (born 1949) – in the connected houses they share in a jungle garden in Panajachel, Guatemala, where they have developed a matriarchal compound in an environment that is both idyllic and somewhat threatening. The painting consists of two violet, ovoid forms that fill the right-hand side of the canvas and sit atop a lime-green wash of swirled paint on a black ground. From the lower of the two violet shapes extends a thin tube or tendril which, as it reaches to the far left of the canvas, feels almost plant-like or biological in the way that it twists and contorts. At the very bottom of the canvas, the whole of the lower section of its composition is reflected or mirrored, as though the entire canvas is sitting on water or some other reflective surface. Although completely abstract in its composition, the painting resonates strikingly with the content and atmosphere of the Vivian’s Garden film. Its watery tones and the slight translucency of all its forms, combined with the swirling waves of paint and the natural colour palette, evoke the feeling of a jungle or dense garden at various times of the day, from dusk until nightfall. In doing so, the painting presents a different – but interconnected – depiction of Nashashibi’s time in Guatemala, as she has explained:

Channel #10

2014, Simryn Gill

These photographs show evidence of sea pollution in a small mangrove forest in Port Dickson, Malaysia, Gill’s hometown. Colourful plastic bags and other rubbish have washed up with the tides, getting stuck in branches and roots. In the black and white photographs, it can be hard to distinguish the waste among the plants. The first photo shows large cargo ships in the distance. This suggests the activities of Port Dickson’s commercial harbour are the source of the detritus. More widely, the series raises questions about the consequences of globalisation on the environment.

Gallery label, April 2021

The Eye in the Sky

2016, Gauri Gill, Rajesh Vangad

Pictograms, as drawn by Vangad on Gill’s photograph, are symbolic signs that represent a word or idea. They are widely used in Warli artistic practices to share stories, there is no written form of the Warli language. Gill describes the process of collaborating across her and Vangad’s visual languages: ‘Rajesh’s language, constructed with stick and brush, unfolds entirely from an encyclopedia of forms in the mind, which emerge to reflect the world, memory and myth.’

Gallery label, April 2025

East of Que Village

2007, Yang Fudong

Created by the Chinese artist Yang Fudong, East of Que Village 2007 is a six-channel black and white video installation with sound that explores a sparsely populated village within a desolate landscape. The videos are projected on six detached and synchronised screens that are arranged around the perimeter of a darkened gallery space. Each of the six videos has a separate soundtrack, broadcast through two speakers hung on the gallery wall either side of their attendant screen. Three of the six videos depict wild, untethered dogs as they roam, fight and scavenge for food – sometimes seen from a distance within a barren rural environment and at other times shot in close up from a perspective near to the ground. The other three videos include further footage of the dogs, but also focus on the inhabitants of the village, who are seen in small, simply furnished homes, in local shops, working in fields, and on one occasion taking part in a festival that features musicians in ceremonial dress. All six videos are characterised by long takes with little or no camera movement, stark imagery, and a sense of quiet that is only briefly punctuated by the sounds of the rustling wind, the dogs’ barking and barely audible conversations between local people. The version owned by Tate is the first in an edition of six plus two artist’s proofs.

The Cost of the English Landscape

1989, Ingrid Pollard MBE

Here, Ingrid Pollard places scenes of the Lake District National Park alongside photographs, maps and texts that reveal the presence of a nuclear power station and explore exclusion and belonging. For Pollard, the work, ‘challenged ideas of the British landscape as a romantic rural idyll of timeless, unchanging nostalgia’. ‘This was done through an interrogation of photographic aesthetics and British landscape histories’, the artist notes. Pollard’s work addresses ‘certain notions of “Britishness”, including race, identity, and exclusion’. She encourages us to look closer at this ‘managed landscape’. As Pollard notes: ‘The trees have been taken away, there are dry stone walls, there are sheep. Everything about it is fabricated for industrial rural use. The barbed wire, the telegraph pole, the tarmac. Stereotypes about Black people are constructed in exactly the same way.’

Gallery label, November 2024

Reveries of an Underground Forest

2019, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan

For this work, Büyüktaşcıyan studied the displacement of the Mississaugas, the Anishnaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples from their lands during the early development of Toronto, Canada. She also researched the immigration to the city of other displaced populations, such as Punjabi communities during the twentieth century. In doing so, she noted similarities between Punjabi and Anishnaabe textile patterns representing the land and aerial images documenting the present city. These informed the abstract compositions she burned into the surface of her carpets. Büyüktaşçıyan connects this form of markmaking with the significance of burning rituals in Anishnaabe culture. The artist has said, ‘through the act of burning, I began to create surfaces that look almost like monumental petroglyphs – rock carvings – or tree trunks that carry marks of several timelines.’

Gallery label, August 2022

Northern Nigerian Landscape

1964, Uzo Egonu

During the early 1960s, Egonu made a number of works which drew on his childhood memories. Born in Nigeria in 1931, he moved to Britain at the age of 14. This work demonstrates his nostalgia for Nigeria through references to the Nigerian landscape, architecture and local traditions. It is an abstract rendition of a northern Nigerian village. Perspective is flattened and the rounded huts stacked on top of each other are outlined with black. Winding lines that could represent the limbs of a tree, paths or rivers divide the painting into distinct parts that are then filled in with decorative designs.

Gallery label, October 2022

The Mountain Opposite II

1955–6, Manolis Calliyannis

Untitled

2020, Lucas Arruda

Untitled 2020 is a small painting in oil on canvas by Lucas Arruda. It depicts a meticulously rendered tropical rainforest in a muted palette. Through thin layers of applying and scratching away paint, Arruda renders the appearance of the denseness and humidity of the jungle. This painting is from Deserto-Modelo (Desert-Model), an extensive and ongoing series of small, rectangular paintings works that often depict atmospheric skies, seascapes and jungles. The series title is inspired by the writings of Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo Neto and, according to the artist, refers to ‘the metaphor of the desert understood as an atemporal place that can’t be grasped through language because there aren’t sufficient visual elements to describe it’ (quoted in Angeria Rigamonti di Cutò, ‘Lucas Arruda: “The only reason to call my work landscapes is cultural”’, Studio International, 19 September 2017, https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/lucas-arruda-interview-the-only-reason-to-call-my-works-landscapes-is-cultural, accessed 5 July 2020).

Hawksbill Bay

2020, Hurvin Anderson

Inspiration from the sea

1963, Ramses Younan

Younan was an artist, writer and political activist. In the late 1930s he co-founded the Egyptian surrealist group Art and Freedom. He believed in the revolutionary power of the imagination, and used the unconscious mind as a source for his art. Starting from an initial improvisation he would develop and refine the surface of his paintings to produce complex abstract compositions. Here forms seem to dissolve and merge into each other. The colours resemble those of an Egyptian landscape.

Gallery label, January 2019

Industrial Landscape

1954, Prunella Clough

Industrial Landscape 1954 is a portrait-oriented oil painting on canvas. A selection of geometric forms rendered with a flat expansive surface and mottled colouring make up the upper background of the work. A lightly maculated grey ground frames the painting’s foreground, which is punctuated by a configuration of textured orange swirls that bores upwards from the lower left corner of the work. A division of horizontal rectangular grey shapes knitted together by a thinner, vertical darker grey shape traverse the middle of the composition. In the upper third of the work, a selection of blue and grey rhombuses and looser rectangles rise, entwining with tight collections of straight black lines to form a selection of motley contours against the beige-grey ground that continues to the painting’s edge.

Volcanic Landscape

c.1941, Ithell Colquhoun

Volcanic Landscape is a semi-abstract drawing in gouache and graphite on paper by Ithell Colquhoun. It depicts a volcanic crater erupting, but instead of lava it produces a jet of rainbow colours which descend to earth in a curved form. As it meets the land, the rainbow breaks into fluid tones of blue and white that suggest a stream of water. Below the rainbow lava are further volcanic craters, and green mountainous forms appear in the distance.

Farm at Watendlath

1921, Dora Carrington

Carrington was part of a successful generation of graduates from the Slade School of Art in the early 20th century. She was associated with the Bloomsbury Group of writers and artists, who lived, worked and studied together in London. This painting shows farm near Keswick in the Lake District, where the newly-wed Carrington spent a summer holiday with her husband and their friends. Critics have suggested that the landscape was distorted to reflect the curves of the female body. The two small figures gaze towards the landscape, possibly contemplating their own femininity.

Gallery label, February 2019

Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows

exhibited 1831, John Constable

This stormy painting is thought to reflect John Constable’s worries about the effect of political reform on the Anglican Church. The subject was suggested by his close friend John Fisher, an Archdeacon who lived in Salisbury. The storm may also represent Constable’s grief following the death of his wife, Maria. When he first exhibited this painting in 1831, debates about political reform were intensifying. The rainbow may have been added later, however, suggesting the storm is passing.

Gallery label, August 2024

Dwelling, Ordsall Lane, Salford

1927, L.S. Lowry

Lowry was fascinated by buildings. For him they evoked the lives of their occupants. He felt that 'A country landscape is fine without people, but an industrial set without people is an empty shell. A street is not a street without people... it is as dead as mutton'. In the 1920s he frequently drew in Salford: 'There were special parts I liked, a bit Georgian, older than the rest. My favourite places were the houses built around factories. They just attracted me more than the others.' Revisiting Orsdall Lane in the 1960s Lowry remembered that as he had drawn in front of the dwelling, 'scores of little kids who hadn't had a wash for weeks would come and stand around me. And there was a niff, too.'

Gallery label, September 2004