«Defiant Gardens» at Halle Nord

This exhibition is the outcome of an extended research project on artist, filmmaker, author, and gay rights activist Derek Jarman (UK, 1942–1994) who, a year after being diagnosed HIV-positive in 1986, acquired a fisherman’s cottage in Dungeness, on the south-east coast of Kent. There he created Prospect Cottage, the house and garden that became a vital site of artistic and horticultural experimentation, where he spent significant time during the last seven years of his life. For Jarman, as for many artists before and after him, the garden, with its powerful metaphorical charge, became a way to approach the concept of nature through critical inquiry, particularly by tracing its entanglement with colonial and anthropological histories. Defiant Gardens brings together artists whose engagement with the notion of the garden belongs to a utopian, decolonial, and feminist tradition, and who share a vision of nature as a space of emancipation.

This project is supported by The Italian Council program (2025) promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture. OCA – Office for Contemporary Art Norway Fondation Engelberts pour les arts et la culture Acknowledgments: Studio Camille Henrot; Mennour, Paris; Amanda Wilkinson, London; Stella Fleurs, Geneva; Tweaklab, Basel; TPG, Geneva; Andreas Kressig, Geneva Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève is supported by Ville de Genève, République et Canton de Genève, Loterie Romande and 1875 Finance Halle Nord is supported by Ville de Genève, République et Canton de Genève

This exhibition is the outcome of an extended research project on artist, filmmaker, author, and gay rights activist Derek Jarman (UK, 1942–1994) who, a year after being diagnosed HIV-positive in 1986, acquired a fisherman’s cottage in Dungeness, on the south-east coast of Kent. There he created Prospect Cottage, the house and garden that became a vital site of artistic and horticultural experimentation, where he spent significant time during the last seven years of his life. For Jarman, as for many artists before and after him, the garden, with its powerful metaphorical charge, became a way to approach the concept of nature through critical inquiry, particularly by tracing its entanglement with colonial and anthropological histories. Defiant Gardens brings together artists whose engagement with the notion of the garden belongs to a utopian, decolonial, and feminist tradition, and who share a vision of nature as a space of emancipation.

This project is supported by The Italian Council program (2025) promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture. OCA – Office for Contemporary Art Norway Fondation Engelberts pour les arts et la culture Acknowledgments: Studio Camille Henrot; Mennour, Paris; Amanda Wilkinson, London; Stella Fleurs, Geneva; Tweaklab, Basel; TPG, Geneva; Andreas Kressig, Geneva Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève is supported by Ville de Genève, République et Canton de Genève, Loterie Romande and 1875 Finance Halle Nord is supported by Ville de Genève, République et Canton de Genève

Mai-Thu Perret, In Darkness Let Me Dwell, 2010 16mm transferred to video 8’, looped In Darkness Let Me Dwell follows the wandering of a young woman, from Tufnell Park Underground station in London to Hampstead. The heroine crosses the park, an uncanny oasis of greenery at the heart of the city, while singing a melancholic Elizabethan song by John Dowland, the sixteenth-century English composer, whose title In Darkness Let Me Dwell also gives the film its name. The artist originally intended to end the journey with a swim in the wooded ponds of Hampstead Heath, but lacking permission, the final scene was shot in Dungeness, Kent, near Derek Jarman’s legendary garden. The film unfolds as a passage between underground and overground, haunted by the prospect of a descent into hell. Mai-Thu Perret develops a multidisciplinary practice that interweaves speculative narrative, craft, and feminist engagement. Since the late 1990s, she has been building a fictional universe entitled The Crystal Frontier, centered on a utopian community of women living self-sufficiently in the New Mexican desert. This fiction provides the framework for sculptures, weavings, ceramics, embroideries, and installations, conceived as artifacts from the collective workshop of these imagined women. Created using artisanal techniques, these works bring into tension narratives of resistance to consumer society, modernist ideals, and forms of women’s emancipation. Perret’s approach is nourished by the history of artistic avant-gardes, which she reactivates through the prism of fiction, language, and the body. Mai-Thu Perret was born in Geneva, where she lives and works. She holds a degree in English literature from the University of Cambridge and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. She has participated in numerous international exhibitions and has received several awards, including the Zurich Art Prize and the Prix Culturel Manor. Soundtrack: Ikue Mori Vocals: Tamara Barnett-Herrin after John Dowland Sound engineering: Marc Uselly Post production: Laetitia Lanvin Bech Artistic production: Mathieu Copeland Supported by IDEHAP, Lausanne Starring Tamara Barnett-Herrin Cinematographer: Bevis Bowden Camera assistant: Brada Barassi Dress fabrication: Naoyuki Yoneto Make-up: Joanna Banach Hair: Teiji Utsumi Production assistant: Portia Barnett-Herrin

Jacopo Belloni, Hypnos, 2025 Essential oil extraction devices in borosilicate glass, metal, silicone tubes, electric heating system, chamomile, water, water pump, refractory ceramic 130 × 85 × 100 cm Hypnos explores the cultural, chemical, and psychophysical relations between plants and human beings. Belloni’s sculpture consists of a series of distillation and essential oil extraction devices which, with their tubes, vials, and spirals, evoke the human lacrimal system. The distillation process releases an abundant flow, as if tears, to extract the essential oils of chamomile. This plant, known for promoting sleep and relaxation, has traditionally been used to treat eye pathologies and infections, and when distilled may release an essential oil of an intense blue color. At Halle Nord, from the opening night and throughout the exhibition, chamomile scents permeate the space, affecting the audience, guiding them towards a state of calm and relaxation. Symbolically and psychically, tears maintain a close affinity with sleep. They can be perceived as a passage, a purification, a bridge connecting wakefulness and dreaming, the living and the spirits, consciousness and the unconscious. Jacopo Belloni is interested in the belief systems of European vernacular cultures. His research draws on anthropological materials and borrows from the history of religions, superstitions, and popular fictions. The occult practices and symbolism of Italian folklore feed his artistic practice, as do magical thinking, the supernatural, and omens. In his works and performances, the transformation of beings and materials, the use of signs, votive objects, and incantations allow the irrational to disrupt what we perceive as “reality.” His contemporary tales and legends reveal the shadowy zones of our present, as well as the anxiety we may feel in the face of a complex and nebulous reality. Yet he also reminds us that customs and traditions are meaning-making practices that allow us to connect to one another. Jacopo Belloni holds degrees from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan (2014), the University of Milan (2018), and a Master’s in Visual Arts from HEAD – Genève (2021). In 2021, Jacopo Belloni was selected for the Biennale College Arte and was a fellow at Instituto Svizzero in Rome in 2023-2024. Recently, his work has been shown at frac île-de-france; ADA Gallery, Milan; Istituto Svizzero, Rome; and Centre d’art contemporain de la Ferme du Buisson, Noisiel, among others.

Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide), The Garden, 2014 DCP (Digital Cinema Package) 56’ A year long filming From April 2013 to April 2014 In an allotment garden of 330 m2 Tuinwijck, Amsterdam The Garden takes the form of a travelogue, retracing a year spent in an allotment garden near Amsterdam. Through her camera, Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide) observes nature in its metamorphoses, shifts in color and form, the emergence, death and decay of plants, as well as the daily life of the garden’s other inhabitants and passers-by. The garden’s cycle reveals an experience of time grounded in biological rhythms, standing in contrast to the dominant logic of capitalist societies, which privileges the spectacular and linear growth. Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide) develops a profoundly engaged body of work that interweaves archives, spirituality, intimate memory, and postcolonial critique. Through video, performance, immersive installation, text, and painting, she interrogates colonial structures, imposed identity narratives, and forms of historical violence that are rendered invisible. Her work explores the possibility