A Conversation On the Necessity of Making Gardens

Tankstation is excited to host a conversation between Laurie Cluitmans and Sam Samiee. Laurie Cluitmans is currently the curator of contemporary art at the Centraal Museum Utrecht, working on the large scale exhibition On the Necessity of Gardening. Cluitmans has worked as an independent curator, critic, and writer with many publications in national and international journals. On her website, “Radicals and Radicants,” as well as in other essays of Cluitmans, one encounters metaphoric usages of the act of gardening as well as thinking about the questions of relation and positionalities through the metaphoric consideration of roots. She provides a fresh method of thinking about bifurcated notions in art history and curatorial practice which can be transcended and studied afresh. Within the conversation series at Tankstation with curators, creators, and artists, we will hear a presentation of Cluitmans’ timely project and join her in thinking about gardening, both in its literal sense as well as in relation to life under lockdown, the shadow of climate change, and political questions of belonging, mobility, migration, and urban wandering.

Tankstation has emerged and thrived as a web of relations between the local and global, often through an intertangling of roots drawing from sensibilities and alternative modes of coexistence in the Persianate world, thought through and applied in the context of contemporary art. The poesis in the approach of Cluitmans with her references to both the world of contemporary art and the world history of gardens will be put in conversation with how at Tankstation we have attempted to provide links between contemporary art and Persianate cultural lineages. This conversation is the first part of a series considering a Persianate mode of relationality in the context of contemporary art by inviting curators, artists, and creators whose works directly or indirectly relate to this cultural and artistic practice, especially addressing mobility, economy, and accessibility.

The conversation will be live on Tankstation Facebook and Instagram.