Image: Kunsthaus Glarus (institution)
‘Conspiracies, or Flowers for Venus’ runs from 19 September to 22 November 2026. Convened by Greg de Cuir Jr, the exhibition features Sonia Boyce, Alice Diop, Ilana Harris-Babou, Mónica de Miranda, Cauleen Smith and Ramaya Tegegne, with an opening on 18 September 2026.
The exhibition is one of three resulting from relationships and dialogues involving newly created and existing artworks. The exhibitions are by Black women from different generations and geographies who address experiences of belonging and community in art, culture and everyday life; ‘Conspiracies, or Flowers for Venus’ engages with the moving image. It is described as an anthology of an international cohort of Black femmes distinguished by their work with moving image alongside other artistic practices.
The exhibition started with Robin Coste Lewis’s 2015 narrative poem ‘Voyage of the Sable Venus’, constructed from fragments of titles and descriptive texts concerning representations of the Black female figure in Western art. The poem narrates a centuries-long campaign of ideological and aesthetic oppression of Black women in which art is an active participant, while pointing toward a decolonial present in which narratives are written by those historically subjected to Western hegemony.
In Cauleen Smith’s video ‘Home Girls’ (2024), an adaptation of ‘Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology’ (1983), Smith reads the names and biographies of the book’s contributors and places a unique flower into a bottle for each woman named. Mónica de Miranda’s video ‘Transplanting’ (2024) moves among Lisbon’s Botanical Garden, natural forests and urban gardens, where dancers interact with plants in spaces carrying either coloniality or radical acts of care.
