Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims is Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s first solo exhibition in Austria. It is centered around the presentation of a new work, coproduced by Kunsthalle Wien. The eponymous film is the latest part of a series called Elemental Cinema; each film in this series is dedicated to one of the four elements. In it, the artists have developed an approach that takes matter, material, and the elemental as its starting point – aspects which continue to be neglected and suppressed by the globally dominant order of thinking and being.

Ferreira da Silva and Neuman’s works undermine patterns of thinking about and relating to the Earth that have been shaped by European colonial modernity. They show that categories and distinctions that seem self-evident to us underlie a profoundly unequal, racist world. Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims turns the spotlight on the persistence, though in altered form, of this modern relation to the Earth in the history of neoliberalism and one of its defining early episodes: Chile under the Pinochet regime.