The Brooklyn Rail

There are 242 miles between Dallas and Houston, a swathe of Texas that unfurls out of the Central Plains into the Coastal Plains, a distinction that sounds trivial until the pines rise up to surround Highway 45, and the open expanse of North Texas falls away in the rearview mirror. The four regions of Texas—also including the Mountains and Basins, and Great Plains (we are very plains-forward)—is one of the many educational flashpoints Texans are taught in the two years of state-mandated Texas History. On the drive down from the metroplex I grew up in, I think of how full I am of Texasisms, and how attached this state is to its land and legacies, when the nature of both has never been a fixed point. Place and space—and who inhabits them—are at a boiling point in Texas. When I finally arrive in Houston, I learn that the rodeo is in town, but I am not here for another Texasism; I am here for FotoFest. I am here for Critical Geography.

The twentieth iteration of the international photography biennial contends with our relationship to land. A symbiotic cycle of molding and destruction is present in many of the works. It might be an expectation that this exhibition presents a cry against intensifying climate change, its impacts, and our culpabilities as a human race. Critical Geography thoughtfully swerves such a simplified and trendy (although it admittedly feels wrong to categorize ecological disaster as trendy) approach. Works in Critical Geography do rightfully explore this, but the breadth of work present digs into the endless ways our existence is entangled with our habitats.

Over twenty international artists are featured in the central presentation at Houston’s Sawyer Yards. The ghosts of an ever-evolving place linger here, a former rail yard turned arts hub in Houston’s First Ward. Industrial structures and silos have been repurposed into studio spaces for artists and storefronts for creative businesses. Trains still pass through on the tracks abutting muraled buildings.

The imprints of the biennial are etched across Houston. Over seventy venues including galleries, museums, and universities are participants in FotoFest, and those landing at George Bush International Airport D terminal are met with a corridor of manifestos from high school students: “I am for a school that is honest as a mirror, honest as the sun”; “I am for a school that teaches us what it’s really like becoming an adult”; “I am for a school that loves me back.” These musings foreground images of vast blue skies by Mark Menjívar, the creator of Looking Up (Voices from Jack Yates High School) (2023).

The theme of Critical Geography seems fitting for FotoFest’s host city: Houston has long been a city whose successes and blights are rooted in land. The city developed with the prosperity of ranching, then oil, and remains centered on the energy sector. While the land in Houston has helped it prosper, its relationship to space and place is not without perils and controversies. Hurricanes and floods have plagued the city whose downtown region rests fifty feet above sea level; and while Houston is currently one of the most diverse cities in America, it is still contending with a history of segregation, redlining, and ongoing gentrification.

Many photographers and image-makers in Critical Geography confront the manufactured boundaries humans impose upon the land. In Borrando la Frontera (2011), a videoed piece of performance art, Ana Teresa Fernández tackles this as we watch her paint a formidable fence on the US/Mexico border. She balances on a ladder in a little black dress and high heels while the Martha Stewart paint she uses (maybe white, maybe blue, like the sky, the sand, the sea) begins visually to obscure the slatted wall that juts into the Pacific Ocean. How we organize, divide, and prune geography to our civil motives is a recurring study in the exhibition. This tension is palpable in Caleb Fung’s “Exile to the Red Planet” series, where he documents the banyan trees that wrap around the structures of Hong Kong like tentacles. In recent decades, banyans have been periodically removed under the guise of public safety, their deaths or overgrowth couched as a threat to urban life. Fung’s work acts as a simultaneous questioning and mourning.

Geography also bears a historical resonance. In her “T-Club” series (1983–85), Libuše Jarcovjáková provides coverage of a place, its specificities and eccentricities, examining how a place can pull you into its orbit (the place in question being a famed LGBTQ+ club in 1980s Prague). Ou Zhihang presents his unclothed body before manmade structures which have been marked by a moment in time, ever reverberating. On delicate polyester, C. Rose Smith grapples with power structures and the suffocations of plantation life for Black Americans. In these immersive self-portraits, Smith, dressed in ungendered colonial garb, stages themself at historical plantation sites in an act of repudiation; our sense of gender and time is warped as the works flutter ever so lightly in their quiet corridor.

A particularly striking set of work comes from artist and filmmaker Adrian L. Burrell’s “Sugarcane and Lightning” series. In the film The Saints Step in Kongo Time (2022), Burrell rises from a bathtub, which rests in a clearing within a sugarcane field. He encases himself in a circle of white chalk, and from within he moves in a spinning, dizzying bodily expression; freedom and confinement push against each other. The intensifying movements of Burrell’s dance are juxtaposed by an intimate interview with one of Burrell’s cousins. We sit with the man, tucked closely together inside a car as he takes a call. He is jovial, he jokes, and then drops into the matter at hand: his life. No, something else, something less sentimental and more site-specific: his existence. He speaks of being shot, of being shot again, of the moment his scalp peeled away from his skull. He speaks of his children. We float through the streets of Oakland. We float back to the dancer. Existence can be a fragile proposition.

Burrell’s film and accompanying photos are a sweeping exploration of his lineage’s diaspora, from Senegal to Louisiana and finally to Oakland. It is a project born from over a decade of archival research and familial dialogue. “The histories of these spaces and the land is always folding in on itself,” Burrell says later when reflecting on how his subjects relate to the places they inhabit. He recalls a sentiment he attributes to Dr. Ayodele Nzinga (Oakland’s first Poet Laureate): “who you are or when you are determines how you are in the universe.”

Critical Geography also bores into the topographical lens of geography. Brad Temkin’s “Aqueduct” series (2021–ongoing) documents how our imprint on the landscape hides in plain sight. He charts the ways we have wielded our natural resources through infrastructure, capturing the systems that carry Los Angeles’s water supply from the Owens Valley into a parched metropolis. The Los Angeles Aqueduct demonstrates the cost and carnage of water through its infamous Water Wars: the Francis Dam collapse which killed over four hundred people, impacted farmers carrying out dynamite blasts, and the years that unfolded as the Owens Valley dried beyond ideal agricultural conditions.

But Temkin’s photos reveal nature’s inescapable influence even within human attempts to command or deviate. Patterns reveal themselves in the mammoth pipes as they mirror the erosion down California cliff sides (Aqueduct Siphon - North Los Angeles County, CA [2023]). A sprinkler masquerades as a protruding branch from the water (Sprinkler Irrigation - Owens Lake, CA [2022]). Waterways, forged by man or millions of years of erosion, seem to share the same winding proclivity when caught in Temkin’s aerial lens. There can be beauty in human design: we are of nature, made ever clearer when our plans echo a natural order. But our complex geographies seem more at peace from above, where pipes camouflage into the desert sand, and disappearing banyan trees are but a shifting shade of green, and we are too far away to see fences and redlines.

“Critical” seemed a fitting identifier for the work at hand, as it explored relationships between human and space that were not just symbiotic but pressing. By the time I left Houston, the wildflowers that speckle Texas highways began to bloom. It seems sudden and miraculous, even though it is cyclical. We keep building highways, and the flowers keep blooming. I get home in less than four hours; my mind lingers in Houston.