Melanie Bonajo – Night Soil

Commissioned by Foam

Artist
Melanie Bonajo

Exhibition design
Clemence Seilles and Theo Demans. 

Curator
Kim Knoppers

Date
16 September – 7 December 2016

Exhibition Brochure

Since 2012 Dutch artist Melanie Bonajo, who lives and works in Amsterdam and New York, has been working on her trilogy Night Soil.

Night Soil is a series of experimental semi-documentary films about cultural phenomena that contradict the linear progression of the capitalist system. Each Night Soil film explores trends that move outside the sociological and political norms of consumer society, most of them illegal. Bonajo presents her first major solo museum exhibition in Foam, for which all three video works will be united.

Night Soil #1/ Fake Paradise looks at the healing effect of the hallucinatory herbal drug Ayahuasca – used in the Amazon rainforest for a thousand years – on the mind and spirit of modern humans.Night Soil #2/ Economy of Love portrays a group of female sex workers in Brooklyn and attempts to change our ideas about intimacy. Night Soil #3 / Nocturnal Gardening, which examines radical and innovative ways to produce food, has its premiere at Foam.

NEXT LEVEL
Since 2015, Foam has been organising the Next Level exhibition series with support from Ammodo. The series aims to introduce a broad audience to the innovative art of relatively young image-makers who take a revolutionary approach to the medium of photography. The first exhibition in the Next Level series was E_M E R G E by Anne de Vries, curated by Kim Knoppers.