Belgian artist Kris Verdonck presents some of the strongest work I've seen in a while- maybe I find it compelling because of its marriage of installation art and ecology- but then, I've always been a fan of immersing the viewer in a challenging environment.
Verdonck filled a gallery space with Belgian's most notorious invasive species (non-native species which flourish under alien conditions, killing off the native biodiversity. Think Maryland's snakehead fish or bamboo problems.) Flora and fauna include grasses, trees, birds, amphibians, and other species.
From Architizer:
Visitors were invited to put on protective suits and traipse through the garden, hyper aware that even the smallest seed or animal cannot be allowed to escape the premises. Drastically changed by its contents, the first floor of the gallery suddenly became a space of quarantine, defined by its duty to enclose and keep out. The protective clothing and the eventual complete destruction of the installation were both crucial to the work as a whole.
Like many of Verdonck’s other installations, EXOTE is a critical reflection on the current state of the world. The artist magnifies our current environmental problems and ecological disasters with a Kafka-esque metaphor, constructing a sealed microcosm of a world that is shaped by man and slowly becoming uninhabitable. Verdonck’s installation turned a bare contemporary art space into an apocalyptic landscape.
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