Opening

“Mutual Terrain”

Friday, July 11, 2025

6:30 PM 8:30 PM

@Redline Contemporary Art Center

2350 Arapahoe Street

Denver, CO, 80205

Curated by: Adán De La Garza + Jenna Maurice

This event is free

Click each artists photo for more information.

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Statement:

Mutual Terrain brings together works that examine the deep entanglements between human life and the natural world. Through imagery, memory, and place-based reflection, this exhibition explores the land not as a passive backdrop but as an active, animate force—one that remembers, resists, and collaborates.

Together, these pieces form a collective meditation on interdependence, offering pathways to re-imagine our relationships with the environments we inhabit. They invite viewers to consider how landscapes shape and are shaped by human presence, challenging the myth of the land as neutral or static.

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Ali Cherri "The Digger" (UAE/ Lebanon)

For twenty years, Sultan Zeib Khan has kept watch over a ruined Neolithic necropolis in the Sharjah desert in the United Arab Emirates. Although majestic, the wide-angle shots have no monumentalising intent: the beauty and extent of the site speak for themselves. What is playing out here is the possibility for one man to become part of a landscape that overwhelms him yet seems to need his help. Seen under the silhouette of a rock about to devour him or as a dwarfed figure spade in hand walking from the back of the frame, Sultan curiously busies himself from day to day to prevent the ruins… from falling into ruin. Here the human remains have long since become archaeological artefacts: the highly luminous outside sequences alternate with shots inside a museum where the bones are sorted and laid out for the visitor’s eye. The switching between day and night but also the soundscape of the man’s singing and the sound of his transistor radio suggest that even the greatest solitude can allow itself be inhabited. Above all, it underlines the paradox of these empty tombs, where death is compounded by the absence of the relics.

Nika Kaiser "Soft Slough" (USA)

Wetlands embody potential in their perpetually undefined qualities. The alligator has survived 65 million years within these intermingled depths. Fugitive slaves fled from plantations in the American south and the Caribbean, founding egalitarian maroons in swamps and forests. Although dwindling, this commingling of land and water generates a shrouded space for the most complex biodiversity of all planetary ecosystems.

Soft Slough is an offering of possibility, where we might become subsumed in murky depths of interconnectedness: envisioning ourselves outside of the realms of failing societal strictures, de-and-recomposing, becoming of a place where a myriad of different practices, relations, and worlds are suspended together.

Colorado Premiere

Felix Kalmenson "A Line is Not a Line" (Canada)

A Line is Not a Line examines the practice of landscape visualization as a technology of colonialism and occupation. Using Google Street view and Earth as a contemporary analog to colonial landscape painting as a technology of power, A Line is Not a Line unpacks how we visualize and understand borders and bordering in global economies and ecologies marked by migration, extraction, and exploitation. The work unpacks how this technology constructs landscapes through a process of cultural and bodily erasure, flattening a multiplicity of subjectivities under the totalizing subjectivity of the colonial gaze.

USA Premiere

Nina Kurtela "Dear Aki" (Croatia)

By looking into artistic and theoretical aspects of the concept of place (or space) and its political, social, economical and cultural implications “Dear Aki” explores notions of fluidity, difference and transformation in relation to topics of naming, identity, nationality, belonging, home, family, state, (im)migration, territory and landscape and its fictions. How do we today in the age of globalization, migration, violent displacement, instability, relate to specific locality, where do we belong, what is home for us? At the time of rise of nationalism, hate, fear, segregation when the borders are getting stronger and walls higher, where do we find safety? Is it physical or perhaps imaginary space?

Presented in the form of a series of fictional letters sent from Nina Kurtela to Aki Kaurismäki read against a backdrop of atmospheric exterior shots, "Dear Aki" is an experimental visual-narrative essay on the nature of naming in the globalized world. Originating from an accidental anecdote about the artist's surname, the film develops through juxtaposing northern and southern imagery while questioning the possibilities of creating new fictional spaces in the realm of already existing landscapes.

Colorado Premiere

Rick Silva "Western Fronts: Cascade Siskiyou, Gold Butte, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and Bears Ears" (USA)

Western Fronts: Cascade Siskiyou, Gold Butte, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and Bears Ears is an experimental video that reflects the political and ecological threats that face four U.S. National Monuments. The work combines aerial drone footage and photogrammetry with 3D animation to create a nature documentary that collapses into itself. The wilderness is scanned by large shapes that momentarily reduce the landscape into grayscale polygons —in these redactions we glimpse a near-future dystopia of computer-vision aided resource extraction.

Ella Morton "The Great Kind Mystery" (Canada)

I visited Newfoundland for the first time in 2012 and could immediately feel what a special place it was. It has since come to be one of the most artistically rich areas for my work. I was struck by how the land exists in a liminal space between the boreal forests of Southern Canada and bare Arctic tundra. The way the rocks heave out of the ocean and hold the weight of the sky is sublime and mournful. The power and complexity of the place is palpable when you’re there.

I met Amy in 2019 and began work with her on this film when I was early in my journey as a documentary filmmaker. We recorded our first interview that year and I visited her childhood home of Daniel’s Harbour on the Northern Peninsula in 2021. Amy’s perspectives were enlightening- her words about the inherent kindness of nature, the land and the universe have resonated with me on all my travels since. The wisdom she shares in this film is remarkable for a young person. It is a privilege to bring her words and my images of our shared love of Newfoundland to international audiences.

Colorado Premiere