A talk with Muhannad Shono and Tairone Bastien, the artist and curator of A Forgotten Place, as they discuss the global questions and local specificities that shape the artwork and the larger Global Co-commission.

The Global Co-commission is an initiative by Alserkal Advisory to commission site-specific public art in an era of escalating climate crisis. Learn more about the initiative here.

A Forgotten Place is a public artwork that carries water condensate from air conditioning (AC) units inside warehouses on either side of the laneway to irrigate a garden of feral plants. It is a microcosm of the inadvertent and varied plant-life that grow largely unnoticed around Al Quoz, fed by unintended lifelines of condensate drip.

The installation draws attention to what the artist calls “AC ecologies” representing nature’s resiliency and adaptation to anthropocentric climate change. The project sets out to think with AC ecologies, to consider the potential of an abundant yet untapped irrigation source that can be found in water-scarce parts of the world.

The talk will be moderated by Mari Spirito