Nature of Seeing
Exhibition (Start of project due 2027)
How have images shaped the ways we learn to see, understand and value plants and the natural world?
The Nature of Seeing is an exhibition at Floras Rike, the gallery of Gothenburg Botanical Garden. It brings eight historical school charts, borrowed from Göteborgs stadsmuseum, into dialogue with new works by two Sweden-based artists.
Once widely used to teach children about plants and the natural world, these illustrated charts have largely disappeared from classrooms. Revisiting them today offers an opportunity to examine not only the scientific knowledge they conveyed, but also the historical perspectives embedded in their images. What was made visible, classified and considered important? What was overlooked? And how do we relate to these ways of seeing today?
The charts were produced within particular scientific, cultural and historical contexts. Their illustrations reflect not only developments in natural history and education, but also broader traditions of collecting, categorising and representing the natural world, including those shaped by colonial histories. Looking at them today raises questions about how knowledge is communicated through images, whose knowledge is represented, and how ideas about nature change over time.
Combining contemporary art with education, the exhibition explores the relationship between plants, people and the ways botanical knowledge has been produced and passed on. Working across photography and installation work, the invited artists bring different artistic approaches into dialogue with the historical charts , opening up questions about ethnobotany, colonial histories and the visual conventions through which plants and their relationships with people have been represented.
The exhibition invites visitors to reflect on how images shape our understanding of the natural world, and how looking differently might change what we notice, know and value.
The exhibition will be developed in collaboration with Göteborgs stadsmuseum and Göteborgs botaniska trädgård.