October 14th - November 11th 2023

Swivel Gallery

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Swivel’s alluring group show Botany of Desire explores how certain plants have evolved to gratify human desires - specically for sweetness, beauty, intoxication, control and healing - and, in turn, how plant species have used man to meet their own benet. Given that plants are immobile, they have learned to be the ultimate chemist in order to further their reproduction. The exhibition draws its inspiration from a book of the same title by Michael Pollan, which questions the idea that people are the sole drivers of domestication. Weaving threads from personal histories, the artists of this exhibition share critical representations of ora and vegetation intertwined with lived experiences and family histories. Curator Sadaf Padder extends the original theory by Pollan to contemplate a fth desire - healing.