Artist’s Garden Film Programme

Programmed in conjunction with the Artist’s Garden commission, ‘Desert is a Forest’ by Sunoj D and Namrata Neog. The film programme features works by Pedro Neves Marques, Lyndsay Mann and Asunción Molinos Gordo.

Lyndsay Mann, A Desire for Organic Order, 2016, Single channel HD digital video, 56 mins. Courtesy of the artist.

A Desire for Organic Order examines institutional and individual concepts of nativeness. Filmed inside the Herbarium and Centre for Middle Eastern Plants at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, this location provides points of departure to explore belonging, dispersal and otherness. The film quietly follows the work of conservators meticulously maintaining the archive’s international specimens. Each gently moving frame exposes the level of care given to these artefacts, while Mann’s eerily neutral voiceover addresses the hidden violence rooted in the collections’ origins.

Lyndsay Mann (Lives and works between Edinburgh and Berlin) is an artist filmmaker. She researches ways that embodied experiences can resist and transform structural pressures. Her work seeks routes for redress and reciprocity, examining institutional narratives of objective knowledge and how these infiltrate our personal perspectives. Voice and belonging are central subjects in her practice. Her observational yet intimate moving image works also integrate drawing, sculpture and writing.

Lyndsay studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London and completed a PhD in Art and Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in 2017. Recent solo and group exhibitions, and screenings include Folkestone Triennial; Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh; videoclub + ArtScience Museum, Singapore; Cooper Gallery, Dundee; LUX Scotland; Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Glasgow Film Festival and MAP; Edinburgh International Film Festival; and Careof Center for Contemporary Art, Milan.