Kari Robertson (b.1988 Edinburgh, UK) is a visual artist, teacher and researcher based in Rotterdam (NL) largely concerned with eco-social themes. She has recently exhibited at CCB, Bogota and TENT Rotterdam.
Working primarily with time-based media, Kari's practice is engaged with impure and entangled substances and states, which speak as much to toxic histories as to collective becoming. She interrogates 'myths of separability' that emerge from modernity, and explores notions of ‘toxicity’ and ‘contamination’ within complex natureculture contexts. Kari has worked with orchids; examining their symbiotic evolution, colonial history and the contemporary global trade in them as commodities. Recently, the artist has taken the ‘hydrologic cycle’ as a starting point to think about liquid substances (e.g milk and rainwater) as forms of collective, embodied and sentient archives which both retain legacies of human endeavour, and gesture towards alternative forms of relation.
Researcher Lecturer Social Practices
I also hold a research position for Social Practices. Initially this involved developing my own proposed research trajectory into interrogating myths of separability concocted under modernity and exploring alternatives. Within this broad context I focused specifically on researching cultural constructions of purity and toxicity.
Teacher in New Earth Social Practices Willem deKooning Academy
I teach in the New Earth department of Social practices at the Willem de Kooning Academy. New Earth has a focus on critically understanding and decolonising ecology and post-capitalist design. I see this as both enriching and being an integral part of my broader practice.
School of Commons Research Fellowship
Research/ Writing commission, 2020 (intro & five essays). Explores contamination and loss of boundaries, through the concept of 'Miasma' (a pre-germ-theory explanation of disease). Miasma actually means 'pollution' but could also be foul odours, fog, mist and noxious gases that spread both ill-health and immorality through the air. Miasma theory is holistic, a relational and negotiated approach to our environment, its postulates that if our surroundings are not healthy, neither are we.
Deltaworkers Residency Mondriaan Fonds
I was awarded the Deltaworkers residency in New Orleans through the Mondriaan Fund. My research proposal involved looking at aquatic architecture, liquid entanglements and attitudes to disease. This residency was hugely influential to my thinking and I am still working with concepts and forms I discovered there.
GHOST Facilitative platform
GHOST is a facilitative entity based in Rotterdam. It was co-founded by Madison Bycroft (AUS), Kari Robertson (UK) and Natalia Sorzano (COL) who met while studying for a Fine Art MA at The Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Together, under this cipher, we are interested in experimental forms of assistance, collaboration, authorship and exhibition-making. We are a mobile entity that has had various events to date (Screenings, performance events, exhibitions) in sometimes unexpected locations.