About

On view at X-Kabinett is a new installation from Gabrielle Zemaityte-Travis’ “Slut Plant Series,” an ongoing project that explores the intersections of language, gender, and ecology through the material and metaphorical figure of the Kalanchoe Daigremontiana, aka “Mother of Thousands,”  —  or more colloquially in Lithuanian, the Slut Plant.

Self-propagating, unruly, and difficult to contain, the plant becomes a site for reclamation, reevaluation, and artistic intervention.

Intimate sculptures — casts of the inside of a closed human hand — contain clusters of plantlets, functioning both as vessels and gestures: a protective cradle, a clenched grip, and a symbol of possession.

The hand, cast as a negative space, becomes a site of violent contradiction: at once nurturing and enclosing, reproductive and extractive, offering and taking.

The work references an anecdote about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was said to have eaten a handful of Kalanchoe plantlets every morning for stamina and vitality. This myth of consumption — of taking life into the self as a means of fortifying it — echoes throughout the project.

By reimagining Goethe’s act through the feminised and derisively sexualised name of the plant, the artist exposes the layered violence embedded in both scientific and cultural systems of classification, including how taxonomy and gendered discourse intertwine to discipline and hierarchise bodies — both human and non-human alike.

By reclaiming the derogatory term “Slut” as a symbol of resilience and abundance, shame is transformed into generative power.

The work stages a confrontation with the violence of language, and by extension, the violence embedded in systems of knowledge and hegemony dynamics: the authority of the white male scientist over the female body, the assertion of human supremacy over the natural world, and the reduction of life to specimen.

The installation is an adapted reiteration of the first ever Kabinett exhibition, staged in London in October 2023 at Camberwell Kabinett.

On view at Oranienstraße 200.