VICIOUS CYCLE. Artistic Research on Ecological Crisis

Opening: 3 March 2023, 8 pm
Running Time: 4 March – 30 April 2023
(closed 7 – 9 April)
Opening Hours: Thu – Sun, 2 – 6 pm

ARTIST TALKS

Gülşah Mursaloğlu, inspired by | Reading Club
14 March 2023, 8 – 9:30 pm CET (online)

Cammack Lindsey
26 March 2023, 4 – 6 pm (on-site @ ALB)

Sybille Neumeyer
23 April 2023, 4 – 6 pm (on-site @ ALB)

Curatorial TEAM

Tuçe Erel, Regine Rapp, Christian de Lutz

CURATORIAL ASSISTANCE

Giada Sarmenti, Mariia Hermann

In March 2022, scientific research revealed that microplastic pollution is now present in the human body. It moves around in the blood, lands in organs and passes to infants via breast milk. The exhibition titled Vicious Cycle is based on this closed cycle of human disturbance of the environment and its return to the human and nonhuman body. In the exhibition, the artists’ investigative and research-oriented works explore the problem of microplastics in soil, the impact of climate change and the effects of excessive agricultural activity on the water, soil, animals and wildlife.

Wem gehört die Welt? by Cammack Lindsey is a sound and site-specific installation featuring an abstract network of algae in amorph containers based on the artist’s ongoing research in Müggelsee Berlin. Since water pollution increases due to agricultural fertilisers and industrial discharges, the growth of toxic, along with non-toxic, cyanobacteria (also known as blue-green algae) and other micro-algae bloom and contaminate bodies of water. The project’s title derives from Kuhle Wampe oder: Wem gehört die Welt?, a film written by Bertolt Brecht in the 1930s, which deals with stories of the working-class struggle set along Berlin’s Müggel Lake.

Gülşah Mursaloğlu’s work Devouring the Earth, in Perishable Quantities contemplates the ways we devour the earth and the underground, both literally and metaphorically. Within the installation, microplastics move around inside washing machine filters, arsenic from solar batteries and computer chips slips into soaps, and artificially manufactured mineral blocks unite with kaolin and transform into medicinal clays. The work hosts various leakage processes, amalgamation and digestion across different temporalities. It aims to underscore the entanglement within the acts of eating/consuming/devouring that is often promoted as choice-based as well as the points and practices of continuity between humans and other agencies.

souvenirs entomologiques #1: odonata/ weathering data is a single-channel speculative video essay and installation by Sybille Neumeyer, that explores the entanglements of humans, weather and insects in a data-driven world in times of radical climate crisis. It follows dragonflies on multiple scales through time and space: from their geological past into uncertain futures, from ecosystems to museum collections, from embodied weather worlds into detached data clouds while multiple insect identities are mediated, shaped and reshaped by co-evolving modes of mapping, monitoring and collecting. While data-based ontologies promise measures of anticipating and controlling futures, the recollection of traditional ecological knowledge reframes observation as the practice of care.