Nature Morte: Extinction in Contemporary Moving Image

Each screening will focus on one or a pair of moving image works. Invited discussants will give a short response before posing questions for relaxed collective conversation about the film.

Extinction is the greatest existential threat of our time yet the extractive practices that precipitate it continue apace. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, more than 49,500 species are currently threatened with extinction. Compounding the harm of biodiversity loss, extinction also presents a crisis of representations as artists and filmmakers grapple with ‘the inability of art to capture an apocalypse to come’ (Andrew Patrizio, 2022).

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Zheng Bo, The Political Life of a Coral Lagoon, Chapter 1 (2025), 15 mins.

The Political Life of a Coral Lagoon 1 is composed of footage from Zheng Bo's daily swims near Poé, among the resplendent biodiversity of the world’s second-largest coral lagoon, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Inspired by the 12th-century poem "The Conference of the Birds" by Sufi poet Attar of Nishapur, biologist Thomas Seeley’s 2010 book "Honeybee Democracy," and drawing on fish behavior research by scientists Iain Couzin and Jens Kraus, Zheng Bo perceives the marine ecosystem as a sophisticated political community. In a script written by the artist that transitions into a final passage enlisting ChatGPT, a speculative first-person dialogue between fishes rouses in speech bubbles. Beginning with an incantatory slogan by iridescent damselfish (Chromis viridis) swimming through an Acropora coral: “Our motto is: Vibrancy, Vibrancy, Vibrancy,” it is a clarion call for a deeper connection and reflection of nature and environmental intelligence, for beauty and political wisdom, against the tides of human hubris, towards a multi-species and interspecies vibrancy. (Text by Jo-ey Tang)

Artist bio

Zheng Bo was born in Beijing in 1974. Their youth was guided by countless elders in mathematics, computer science, art, archery, and premodern wisdom. Since 2013, they have been studying with plants: ferns in Taiwan, mosses in Scandinavia, grass trees in Western Australia, and date palms in the Arabian Peninsula. More recently, they have turned toward the ocean, getting to know a coral lagoon in the South Pacific. Their works are held in the collections of Tate, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Power Station of Art, and Hammer Museum, among others.

Discussant

Louisa Dassow is a posthuman feminist researcher at Newcastle Law School applying ideas of multispecies justice and critiquing anthropocentrism in the new international Ocean Biodiversity treaty. Her work considers the politics of knowledge and access to certain knowledges underpinning narratives of environmental crises by challenging anthropocentrism and attached political hierarchies. Louisa’s lived experience as an underwater photographer and her coral reef companions are central to her work on oceanic interconnection within a law and policy setting, challenging her to promote new imaginations about the more-than-human in the context of environmental multi-crises.