Baltic, Gateshead
The Iraqi-American’s intricately-labelled planters and models form a repository for stories on everything from the destruction of Palestinian olives to homesick migrants
Among the potted geraniums, a pop-eyed man is being devoured by a lion. This would give you pause down the garden centre but that’s not all: a bull’s head rests on flowers, a gigantic snail makes its way towards nasturtiums and a model aeroplane, fabricated from food packaging, has somehow crash-landed between the tamarisks and the date palms. There is a lot more to discover in the high-sided planters, with their sandy soils and loam, the saplings and herbs, in Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz’s The Waiting Gardens of the North, his project for the light-filled top-floor gallery at Baltic.
Small labels stuck in the soil between the plants give us more than growing advice. There are no bargain blooms here. Among the young olive saplings, a label tells us how up to 2m olive trees and countless groves have been destroyed by the Israeli authorities since 1967, as a primary form of land acquisition; the deficit in olive production affects 100,000 Palestinian households, the uprooted trees causing an annual loss of over $12m. Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish has written: “If the olive trees knew the hands that planted them, their oil would become tears.” “Douma [in Syria] used to smell of roses”, writes a perfumer. “Now it reeks of gunpowder”, and a gardener laments that the damask rose will not return “til this war is over”. So many wars.
