Venue: MQ Freiraum, MuseumsQuartier Vienna, Austria
Date: February 22 – May 7, 2023
Curator: Verena Kaspar-Eisert
LandRush’s latest exhibition was at the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna. Many LandRush – Ventures into Global Agriculture visitors stayed for hours or returned multiple times to explore themes such as seed, water and land rights, environmental justice, climate change, and the complex relationships and individual approaches that govern global agriculture. The exhibition featured all three LandRush chapters with a combined run time of around 12 hours:
WHITE GOLD (2007 – 2020) examines global cotton production’s social and ecological consequences. It sheds light on the mass suicides of cotton farmers locked into a vicious debt cycle in India, the highly subsidized cotton industry in Texas, the struggle of farmers in Burkina Faso trying to survive in a distorted market, and the drying Aral Sea.
LANDRUSH (2011 – ongoing) analyses the impact of large-scale agro-investments on rural economies and land rights, the boom in renewable fuels, the reallocation of land, and the future of agriculture worldwide. It documents neo-colonial land grabbing in Ethiopia, industrial mega-companies in Brazil, family farms flourishing due to ethanol production in Iowa, and organic farming and land use policies in Eastern Germany.
DRY WEST (2014 – ongoing) documents the water use and the human-shaped landscapes of the American West that demands more water than nature provides. More than 80 percent of the water goes to an agricultural system that turned harvesting into a mining operation: instead of copper, gold, or oil, agriculture mines highly subsidized water.