Surviving Paradise (mixed media installation Wave Hill, the Bronx March 4 – 29, 2006)

Mosul, Basrah, Kirkuk, Najaf, Karbala, Fullujah, Baghdad: Cities whose names flash across our television and radios with news of devastation and suffering. Cities also located in what was once the cradle of civilization and referred to as the Fertile Crescent.  A diaspora of plants now central to human diet and industry derive from this once lush region, which also gave rise to agriculture and animal husbandry as well as the monotheistic religions.

In Surviving Paradise Janet Koenig and Greg Sholette create a miniature "epic" theater in which botanical survival and human desire are linked to the repeatedly war-torn landscape of the Middle East.

Five dioramas represent the successive impact of human invasions in the region first by the Persians in 539 BC, followed by the Greeks in 331BC, by Arabs in 640 AD but not represented in the piece, then by the Mongols in 1258 AD, the Ottomans in the 1500s and finally by the British in 1918 whose discovery of oil radically alters the geo-politics of the region throughout modern times. A process of desertification intensifies with each military conquest beginning with the uppermost tableau in which impressive irrigation systems that once transformed the arid land between the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates into a paradise are visibly disappearing, to the bottom diorama revealing a virtual wasteland.

In each scene a miniature wooden easel implausibly holds a small painting showing one of five plant species originating from the Middle East --the pomegranate, date palm, cedar, grapes, and lotus flower-- all of which are found today at Wave Hill Gardens. (A nearby key provides the actual location of each specimen in the gardens.) The miniature stage sets are framed by an archway that incorporates ornaments inspired by Assyrian and Persian designs which are also based on these plants, as well as images reflecting the invading Persian, Greek, Mongol, Ottoman, and British warriors. The word Babel is visible in Arabic as a pattern immediately surrounding the diorama tableaus alluding to the fantastic, and most likely mythical Hanging Gardens.

Surviving Paradise is a study in contrasts. The mythical and the real, the ancient and the modern confront each other at the intersection of botanical survival and geopolitical interests.

Janet Koenig and Greg Sholette frequently collaborate on projects including "disLOCATIONS" for inSITE94 in which the artists produced a series of dioramas about the forgotten radical history of the IWW in San Diego, CA and Tijuana, Mexico. Other collaborative projects include subway posters for Group Material, an installation for the Brooklyn Army Terminal, and REPOhistory, a public art and activist collective whose mission focused on site-specific street signs "repossessing" lost of forgotten histories of New York City.  Their work was recently included in Moving Targets an exhibition of posters on the Berlin-Poznan Deutsche Bahn rail line in Germany. Janet Koenig's solo project "Eat/Shop/Vote" was exhibited at the Ramapo College Library in NJ, and Gregory Sholette presented work in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council exhibition "A Knock At The Door" last Fall at The Cooper Union. His solo exhibition "Selected Projects" was on display at Colgate University, Hamilton, NY while he where he was the "Distinguished Batza Family Chair in Art and Art History" in the Spring of 2004.