DONNA CONLON

For more than 2 decades, the American biologist and artist Donna Conlon (b. 1966) has formulated socially critical and ecological artistic statements with her photographs and videos, which reflect on humanity’s reckless behavior in a globalized world.

Conlon’s 5 ½ minute long video Coexistence from 2003 is based on a close observation of a colony of leafcutter ants, which supply their nest in the rainforest with cut leaves from the surrounding plants. The ants do not eat the leaves, but transfer them via gardener ants to a fungus in the nest, which can break them down for nourishment. In this way, the ants not only live in a regulated community consisting of workers, the queen, guardians and gardeners, but also in a symbiosis with the fungus – while the large consumption of leaves challenges the balance of the surrounding ecosystem.

Into this milieu of multiple coexistence, Donna Conlon has filtered an ambivalent geopolitical agenda, inscribing in a series of leaves the international peace symbol and flags of various countries. The great multitude of waving national symbols and peace signs signals at first glance a conciliatory global coexistence of differences where the desire for conflict-free coexistence dominates. But a closer examination of the video reveals that the national flags mainly represent countries that around the turn of the millennium were involved in military conflicts.

The well-organized society of the ants and their carefully balanced world based on regulated co-existences is thus portrayed as disharmonious and vulnerable through a humanizing and national cultural perspective.

Coexistence thus questions whether incompatible individual national interests, that include the need for harmony and the desire for peace as well as aggressive concepts such as the struggle for resources and conflict, characterize the common denominator of the real essence of the United Nations. Or in other words: At what price could the dream of global peace in a socially and culturally diverse world with limited resources really be achieved?

About the artist

Donna Conlon lives and works in Panama City. After training as a biologist at the University of Kansas, she completed her art studies at the Rinehart School of Sculpture in Maryland, Baltimore in 2002. She has participated in the Venice Biennale in 2005 and in a number of group exhibitions worldwide. Donna Conlon’s art is represented in many prominent collections, e.g. at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.