Exploring Forest Ecologies: White Cube, London's 'Alien Shores'

 Installation View of Room 1, 'Alien Shores: Land Once Removed', White Cube, Bermondsey, London (9 July - 7 September, 2025).

By GRACE PALMER July 30, 2025

“A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.”  Ursula K. Le Guin’s words from her 1972 science fiction novel The Word for World is Forest, resonate throughout Susanna Greeves’ curatorial return to White Cube. Comprised of 34 artists, ‘Alien Shores: Land Once Removed’ manifests Le Guin’s fictional forest ecology. Through upending the landscape genre, Greeves has curated an atemporal exhibition. Notions of fixity, nationalism, identity and rootedness are confronted in each artist’s exploration of the theme. Instead, we enter and exit numerous worlds, living and breathing in verdant lands, only to perish and crumble in their dystopian counterparts. Yet, in the three rooms afforded for this exhibition, the tone is not of fear but of experimentation. Just as our presumptions of the landscape genre are disrupted, Greeves forces us to recognise our preconditioned understanding of “alien”. By embracing the unknown and reckoning with our discomfort in it, ‘Alien Shores’ successfully counters the prejudicial terms of the unnatural. Filtered through technology, mythology and abstraction, this multimedia showcase embraces the adventure of the unknown: calling us to seek out these ‘alien shores’.

Most successful provocative exhibitions hold an inherent dichotomy: straddling the lines of dystopia and utopia. ‘Alien Shores’ establishes a conversation between these two disparate ideologies. Functioning as a subterranean exploration, the first room of this exhibition reveals Greeves’ dystopian visions. Drawn in by the untethered soundscape, this dimly lit room cultivates a world where landscapes collapse, vacant horizons expand, and nature fights for survival. In this room, nature becomes unknown, uncharted, and inexplicable – nature becomes “alien”. Perhaps the most arresting (and extraterrestrial) contribution to this space is Marguerite Humeau’s Skero. Measuring 2 metres tall and 4 metres wide, Humeau’s sculpture reaches its tendrils across the gallery. Blending rubber with epoxy resin, the sculptures’ roots seemingly melt into the ground. Yet, out of this shell-rooted form appear these thin stems, blossoming delicate hand-blown glass flowers. Otherwise titled The Dormant, Humeau’s beautiful, mutated form sits on the precipice of eruption. It is as if, at any moment, thousands more shoots will grow and entrap its environment. Humeau, alongside the other artists in this room, capture an alien shore that both unsettles and intrigues.

  Marguerite Humeau, Skero (The Dormant), c. 2024, embellished silk double organza, cast rubber, sediments, pigments, hand-blown glass, milled walnut, polyurethane foam, epoxy resin and stainless steel, 280 x 468 x 170cm.

Technology plays a key role in Greeves’ exploration of the dystopic alien. Using depth and installation, Room 2 abstracts both the natural and its artistic reproduction. Bagus Pandega and Kei Imazu’s collaborative work, Artificial Green by Nature Green 4.1, overturns the established rules of landscape painting. Moving across the linen canvas, Pandega and Imazu’s painting-and-erasing machine creates the rainforest scene in real time. Simultaneously mocking and mocked by the jelly palm tree placed beside the installation, Artificial Green is laden with rhetorical questions. What value does a landscape hold when made by a machine that has never seen nature? What role does an artist have in this technological era? Most profoundly, the work questions whether nature can survive under this dystopian technological power. What world awaits us when our landscapes are painted and erased by machines?

  Bagus Pandega and Kei Imazu, Artificial Green by Nature Green 4.1, c. 2025, painting-and-erasing machine, water-based paint on linen canvas, modular synthesiser, LED screen, PC, and jelly palm tree. 

Intending to disrupt the traditions of landscape painting, Greeves’ curation liberates the genre from its cultural, national and religious ties. In ‘Alien Shores’, landscapes no longer simply depict what is before us. Instead, they explore a world as seen through our subjective, emotional and nostalgic eyes. Enticed by what Greeves classifies as "the persistent tug of landscape", this exhibition does not dwell in its dystopian mire. Opening out into the final complex of rooms, this exhibition embarks on its utopian (or at least liberatory) adventure. Although the abundance of abstraction at times merges into a single uniform palette, Greeves succeeds in staging her confrontational abstraction. Take, for example, Robert Zehnder’s paired paintings, Tiramisu and Hip Bone. Reminiscent of the melting Daliesque vision-scapes, Zehnder’s canvases portray the land as unstable, ever-changing, transforming - rich with possibility and imagination. Moving away from the existentialism of works like Artificial Green, Zehnder contemplates the world’s future, not as destruction, but full of creativity, play and experimentation. Ken Gun Min’s multimedia canvases further embrace this optimistic playfulness. Combining beads, embroidery, pearls, and gemstones, her piece Everything we can imagine as light stands out as a kaleidoscopic carnival. Perhaps referencing the mysticism of Arcadia, Min’s canvases engage with our latent desire to reconnect to the mythology of the land. Paired with works by Georgia O’Keeffe, Alyina Zaidi and Richard Mayhew, these culminating abstractions offer us a glimpse into the richness to be discovered by embracing these “alien shores”.

Ken Gun Min, Everything we can imagine as light c. 2025, baroque pearl, crystal, assorted gemstones, vintage beads, Korean pigment, silk embroidery, thread, found fabric, oil on canvas, 177.8 x 233.7cm.

Susanna Greeves’ exhibition artistically visualises Le Guin’s delicate forest ecologies. Navigating dystopias and utopias, this exhibition effectively captures the inherent irony of humanity's relationship to the natural world. By destroying and isolating ourselves from the world, whilst yearning for this distant, Arcadian land, humanity has alienised the landscape. Rather than shy away from these new conceptual vistas, Greeves encourages us to embrace these unprecedented worlds. These artists' abstract perspective on the landscape genre challenges our assumptions about how we engage with, perceive and explore the land around us. For a forest ecology to thrive, the land must be borderless, diverse, and transformative – not closed off, fixed, national and rooted. Perhaps for Greeves, in the 21^st Century, the word for "world" is also the word for "alien". 

Alien Shores: Land Once Removed runs between July 9 – September 7, 2025, at White Cube, Bermondsey, London WM