MATSUTAKE GALLERY
Sarah Rara - Orchis
ORCHIS (2024)
Video with sound
RT 22:12 min
Exhibition on view from March 11, 2025 until further notice.
ORCHIS examines orchid flowers and their relationship to gender, queerness, politics, and desire. Wildly diverse, gender-bending, and found in nearly every habitat on Earth, ORCHIS looks at natural and cultural histories of the orchid as queer-coded, while also wielded as symbols of military and economic power.
Sarah Rara’s multi-disciplinary practice— including video, sound, performance, and writing— explores the position of witness within fragile systems, and the socio-political and personal dimensions of sensing technologies. Their work in sound and moving image considers gender, queerness, technology, disability, and illness in connection with environmental research. They are a primary organizer of the ongoing project lucky dragons. Their work, solo and in collaboration, has been presented at such institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art (as part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial), the Hammer Museum, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, London’s Institute for Contemporary Art, PS1 in New York, REDCAT and Human Resources in Los Angeles, MOCA Los Angeles, the 54th Venice Biennale, Documenta 14 in Athens, and the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others. Rara is a 2018 recipient of the LACMA Art + Technology fellowship and current artist-in-residence at Bangkok 1899, Bangkok, Thailand. Rara is Assistant Professor of Moving Image at Williams College.
