“The Water Cabinet” (2023/24) is the duo’s new four-channel film work, created in collaboration with Stella Reinhold-Rudas and Anima Garden, Marrakech. Issues like labor relationships, situated knowledge, climate fiction (cli-fi), water supply, and microecology are addressed in audiovisual vignettes*. Gardeners and horticultural technicians talk, each in their respective language, about their workday, routines, their motivation, about techniques and their favorite spots in the garden.

Listen to gardeners in their languages.

Look at beauty as a technique, look at technics as a beauty.

Gloves make ritual.

Think about ecology not only as a supply system.

Un-blueprint Eurocentric motifs.

Decolonize the Garden.

This collaboration was informed by Hanakam & Schuller’s fascination with gardens as places where nature and culture, migration and the history of colonialism all come together. The Anima Garden was considered prototypical of the “oasean garden.” The focus of interest was the question of how to reread gardens as cultural artifacts, as something beyond the physical transformation of landscapes that inspires critical reflection on power, knowledge, and cultural identity in contemporary art.

The works of Hanakam & Schuller have previously been shown by Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Eyebeam, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; MAK, Vienna; MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles; National Art Center, Tokyo, a.o.

Opening on February 25, 2025

tresor im Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien