In this conversation, art critic and Berkeley History of Art PhD student Tausif Noor recently discussed the art exhibition, Botanical Entanglements, currently on view at the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens, from March 12th – 18th, 2022 with environmental artist Dr. Juniper Harrower. Botanical Entanglements is a site-specific ecological art exhibition that explores embedded histories in plant form. With this work Harrower is interested in the ethnobotanical histories and localized ecologies of specific plants at the botanical garden and in her Berkeley neighborhood. She asks, how have colonialism and development fractured these human-plant relationships? What are the roles that plants play in constructing our identities and how do we in turn influence their ways of living?
Tausif Noor is a critic, curator, and PhD student in the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley. Juniper Harrower is an ecologist and environmental artist specializing in multispecies entanglements under climate change.