Youmna Chlala: Future Flora

BPL Presents is pleased to exhibit a series of new multimedia works by artist and writer Youmna Chlala. CBPL Presents is pleased to exhibit a series of new multimedia works by artist and writer Youmna Chlala. Chlala's drawings, works on paper, films, and sculptures coalesce around questions that invite us to imagine other ways of being.

Chlala's new series Future Flora considers climate-induced plant adaptations as a basis for emergent aesthetics, and, more broadly, to consider the lives of local plants as mirrors to our own. 

Future Flora is a part of Chlala's The Museum of Future Memories, an ongoing series of works that imagines what happens when the horizon line disappears. The text exhibited alongside photocollages is taken from the installation project, How Many Tongues Does it Take to Make a Color? which proposes blue as our future language.  
As Chlala writes: 

In the future, flora will migrate, seeking sun-warmth, supportive species, bodies of nourishing water and ways to dry salt-soaked roots. It will continue to adapt, like it always has, to the ecosystems it encounters. These memoryscapes briefly mark the library as a space of archival and speculative knowledge, reminding us that adjacencies affect our collective coming into being.

ˆFuture Flora is on view in the front lobby cases and on the second floor balcony at Central Library.

About the Artist

Youmna Chlala was born in Beirut and lives in New York. She has exhibited at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Hayward Gallery, The Drawing Center, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Dubai Art Projects, Hessel Museum of Art and MAK Center for Art and Architecture. She participated in the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, 7th LIAF Biennial in Norway, and 11th Performa Biennial. She is the recipient of an O. Henry Award and a Joseph Henry Jackson Award. Chlala is the author of the poetry collection, The Paper Camera.