Art for Nature is back! We invite the public and all our supporters to view an exhibition of challenging contemporary art works that explore ideas related to unsustainable consumption and how our insatiable appetites have driven the natural environment to a tipping point.
The exhibition will be at the Rimbun Dahan Gallery and admission to the exhibition is free.
Date: 10 July – 24 July, 2011
Time: 10:00am to 4:00pm on weekends or by appointment, Monday to Friday
Venue: Rimbun Dahan, Km. 27, Jln Kuang, Kuang, Selangor
Art enthusiasts are welcome to attend the curator’s talk, to be held on 16 July, 3pm at Rimbun Dahan. If you love plants, don’t miss the Rimbun Dahan tour on 9am, 17 July, and enjoy the only indigenous Malaysian gardens in the world. Adult dance lovers are invited to a site specific dance performance on the evenings of 23 and 24 July from 7pm to midnight. The theme of Dancing in Place this year will be Art for Adults… with a twist, and set in various locations in the gardens of Rimbun Dahan. The traditional Malay kampong house that dates from 1901 will also be open to visitors.
Sponsored by Hijjas Kasturi Associates, Art for Nature is an annual charity art exhibition, the proceeds of which support artists and WWF-Malaysia’s nature conservation efforts.
Consumption drives our economies, but also drives environmental degradation. A lot of consumption is beyond our control; we rarely know where our food comes from or what production costs are in environmental terms. “Can eat or not?” is a standard refrain of Malaysians. We share an absurd sense of national pride in our fixation with food and our ability to eat anything in front of us. Our interest in nature is largely controlled by what we can get out of it – is that fruit edible? How do you cook that fish? What are the medicinal properties of the plant, and will it cure my baldness? – rather than what we can contribute to nature, or our own increasingly precarious position on the top of the food chain.
When our personal enjoyment is at stake, we shouldn’t let our sense of responsibility lapse. By eating shark’s fin, we are as culpable as the fisherman who finned and left the fish to drown. We do not need to take animals from the wild to cure our ailments when we have an arsenal of pharmaceutical solutions. There is no scientific proof that a tiger’s tooth can cure rabies or asthma. Or that turtle eggs will increase one’s libido.
Humans are the only species who can choose to modify their behaviour and we need to do so sooner rather than later. Make no mistake when we loose these wonderful species we will lose their habitats and free environmental services that come with those healthy marine and terrestrial spaces.
Malaysians can make better food choices without sacrificing our pride in our food. We can make decisions with our head rather than our stomach.