Kari Robertson (b.1988 Edinburgh, UK) is a visual artist, teacher and researcher based in Rotterdam (NL) largely concerned with eco-social themes. She has recently exhibited at CCB, Bogota and TENT Rotterdam.
Working primarily with time-based media, Kari's practice is engaged with impure and entangled substances and states, which speak as much to toxic histories as to collective becoming. She interrogates 'myths of separability' that emerge from modernity, and explores notions of ‘toxicity’ and ‘contamination’ within complex natureculture contexts. Kari has worked with orchids; examining their symbiotic evolution, colonial history and the contemporary global trade in them as commodities. Recently, the artist has taken the ‘hydrologic cycle’ as a starting point to think about liquid substances (e.g milk and rainwater) as forms of collective, embodied and sentient archives which both retain legacies of human endeavour, and gesture towards alternative forms of relation.
She is currently developing work around the toxic soil of Rotterdam.
Kari co-founded and also works within collaborative facilitative platform GHOST with Madison Bycroft and Natalia Sorzano.