SINA HENSEL

is a Brussels based visual artist and researcher with a special focus on critical colour practices. They include the question of various ecologies of colour and the kaleidoscopic transformations caused by the current and future chemical make-ups of landscapes and environments.

The Future Is a Purple Tree, 2025 at the Wintertuin at the Royal Academy of Arts Antwerp (with Inês Neto dos Santos)

The Future Is a Purple Tree (Sina Hensel) and Collective Gestures (Inês Neto dos Santos)

In this exhibition, the final presentations/work-in-progress/gatherings for two research projects from the Art & Ecology research group, colour and fermentation meet as parallel gestures of belonging and adaptation. The Future Is a Purple Tree traces how plants protect themselves through pigment – a more-than-human gesture that offers ways to see and sense environmental shifts and local resilience. Collective Gestures follows the slow work of fermentation, where microbes, textiles and human stories travel together across borders and time. Brought into dialogue, these projects invite attention to processes that sustain life beyond the human, and that might inform more grounded ways of living with the land- and waterscapes that we call our home.

The Future Is a Purple Tree, 2025, colour notes from anthocyanins, cotton, felt, laser-engravings of BASF colour etiquettes on anthocyanin stained pine wood, ceramic potatoes made after the seed purple potatoes which grew in the garden over the research period, ceramic ash glaze made from fallen purple leaves of a cherry plum tree in the Josaphat park in Brussels, purple potato salad from the potatoes grown in the garden, gifted carpet