Rethinking Landscape with “Alien Shores”
Installation view of Alien Shores, 2025, White Cube Bermondsey, 9 July–7 September 2025. Photo © White Cube (Ollie Hammick).
How do we view land without repeating the violence that has shaped its image? Alien Shores, currently on view at White Cube Bermondsey, brings together a group of international artists to interrogate landscape not as a passive backdrop, but as a constructed, ideological, and deeply affective space. Traversing the terrains of memory, technology, and extractivism, the exhibition lays bare how colonial and nationalist imaginaries have shaped our relationship to the earth, and how art can unmake and reimagine that bond.
Land and landscape have never been neutral—they have always reflected a particular way of relating to the land, one shaped by history, power, and ideology. As Françoise Vergès writes, the European invention of the landscape as a meditative or descriptive site played a crucial role in the colonial project.[1] Pastoral aesthetics and idealised vistas naturalised the plantation system, erasing Indigenous and Black presence while portraying territories as wild, uninhabited, or in need of control. The use of landscape as a tool of domination continued: landscape painting became central to the construction of national identity. The geographical composition of the territory and the way it was represented played a foundational role in growing nationalism; the visual programmes shaped how landscapes were depicted and helped build the “ideal” community of the nation-state. These images fostered a sense of belonging, rooted not only in history or culture but in the land itself. Nations were, and are, made of stories and territory.
The landscape became the window through which we tried to understand, possess, and shape our territories. It helped materialise borders and fictionalisations, transforming abstract ideas of nationhood into something visual, something ostensibly real. By changing how land is represented, we can begin to shift our mindset about countries, borders, and the systems that maintain them. The artworks in Alien Shores embrace their affective and symbolic power, dismantling the inherited imaginaries that have shaped our visions of territory. They reveal the landscape as both a political construction and a space for dreaming otherwise.
Installation view of Alien Shores, 2025, White Cube Bermondsey, 9 July–7 September 2025. Photo © White Cube (Ollie Hammick).
Alien Shores unfolds across three rooms. The first one greets us with a dim atmosphere, anchored by the film of Noémie Goudal, which shows a collapsing landscape, slowly peeling away its surface to reveal the structures that hold together its imagined, unreal vision. Surrounding Goudal’s work, Sholto Blissett represents hyperrealistic landscapes that appear detached from earthly logic or suspended in time, as if drawn from a world that existed before humans set foot on it. Darren Almond’s works extend this sense of scale and distance, expanding the horizon of these imagined terrains. This first room, charged with a distinct sci-fi feeling, establishes a crucial premise: landscape is not fixed, but a construction that can be dismantled and reinvented.
The second room opens into a brighter space, pulling the legacy of landscape into dialogue with technology. Bagus Pandega and Kei Imazu’s Artificial Green by Nature Green 4.1 (2025) hums and clicks as a machine tirelessly paints and erases a Dutch landscape, quietly insisting on the cycles of construction and erasure we impose on the land, always remaking it to suit our needs. Facing it, Tomás Sánchez’s paintings hold fragments of green, almost paradisiacal natural scenes surrounded by a quiet, white stillness. These dreamlike landscapes are suspended and isolated, as if plucked from the world and set apart for contemplation; referencing the way humanity’s central place in the story of the Earth has so often led to its exploitation, turning symbols of nature into objects of desire and, inevitably, destruction.
The adjoining corridor is lined with Pranay Dutta’s works. They bring to light the landscape as an artistic and cinematic experience, revealing the façades and scaffolding that prop up orchestrated environments. His references to Potemkin villages and the cosmetic redevelopment of Indian slums before global spectacles like the G20 summit expose the uneasy intersection of aesthetics, authority, and control. At the corridor’s far end, Eva Jospin’s monumental cardboard forest unfolds in layered perspective. It feels like a stage set, a scenography for a performance in which we are all implicated, and walking toward it feels like stepping into the backdrop of the next act.
Installation view of Alien Shores, 2025, White Cube Bermondsey, 9 July–7 September 2025. Photo © White Cube (Ollie Hammick).
The third room is the brightest of all—a space where imagination fully takes over. Here, the landscape becomes a site of memory, myth, and speculation. Fernanda Galvão’s surreal biomes combine anatomical forms with tropical flora, imagining futures marked by adaptation. Emma Webster’s Borrow Every Forest (2025) creates virtual reality dioramas, fragments of multiple superimposed landscapes, later translated into oil-painted environments that emphasize the synthetic aspect of human interactions with nature. Ken Gun Min blends Korean sansu ethos, minhwa motifs, Christian iconography, and Western painting techniques into layered visions of place. These works are a reminder of other kinds of vision, ones connected to larger myths and cosmologies, to abstraction, to other worlds. They introduce non-Western depictions and other relationships to the land, expanding the idea of landscape beyond territory into its relationship with every aspect of human life. Throughout the exhibition, quotes punctuate the space, offering insight into the artists’ worlds. One of my favourites reads: “There is no such thing as an innocent landscape. So much has happened in landscapes, they are charged with history, events, and battles—all of which leave traces.” Anselm Kiefer’s words echo the exhibition’s refusal to present the land as untouched or neutral.
Rather than longing for a return, Alien Shores proposes that landscapes, like nations and borders, are fictions that can be remade. The artists not only unravel the genre of landscape, shifting it from document to dream, from representation to resistance, but also invite us into that process. The exhibition becomes more than a display; it becomes a site for speculation where we are asked to invent new geographies, new relationships to land, new ways of belonging: a call to travel to—and help shape—those alien shores.
Installation view of Alien Shores, 2025, White Cube Bermondsey, 9 July–7 September 2025. Photo © White Cube (Ollie Hammick).
Alien Shores is on view at White Cube Bermondsey from July 9 through September 7, 2025.
[1] Françoise Vergès, “At the End of Colonial Daybreak, Lays Waste,” in Sandra Gamarra Heshiki: Pinacoteca Migrante, exh. cat., ed. Agustín Pérez Rubio (Buchhandlung Walther König, 2024), 83–87.
