Bayrle

Thomas Bayrle

Madonna City Madonna Golden Nugget Club

Series and reproduction in Thomas Bayrle’s work serve as markers of overproduction and the gradual erasure of a qualitative appreciation of our environment. It reflects a contemporary movement mirroring the idea of progress developed in the West since the 18th century. Bayrle traces the age of the machine back to the 13th century, showcasing car engines with a certain admiration, comparing their mechanics to Gothic cathedrals, and evoking the rhythmic humming of scattered monks in medieval Europe.

For Anthropocène Monument, Thomas Bayrle presents a series where religious imagery intertwines with symbols of the mechanization of the world. In the four screen prints submitted by the artist for the project, the drapery of a Gothic Madonna transforms into highways.

BIO

Thomas Bayrle was born in Berlin in 1937 and now lives and works in Frankfurt. He was a permanent lecturer at the Städelschule in Frankfurt from 1975 to 2002. His work has been shown in some of the world’s most important exhibitions, such as documenta 3, 6, and 13 in Kassel, Germany (1964, 1977, 2012), and the 50th and 53rd Venice Biennales (2003, 2009). He has held major solo exhibitions at MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art, Vienna (2017); Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2016); Lenbachhaus, Munich (2016), and has received numerous awards and prizes, including the Cologne Art Prize (2000) and the Prix Arts Electronica, Linz (1995).  Bayrle is best known for his ‘super-forms’, large images composed of iterations of smaller cell-like images. Humorous, satirical, and often political, his paintings, sculptures, and digital images are commentaries on the systems of control and domination in a rapidly globalizing economy, via allegorical references to traffic patterns, mass production, and the generic designs of popular goods such as wrappers and wallpaper. 

Relevant Themes: extraction, transport, infrastructure

Category: Events

Gusmão & Pedro Paiva

Falling Tree

João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva

Falling Tree describes a practice of wild and motorized harvesting that the duo wishes to accompany with a divine fictive order:

“Be fruitful and multiply and I will give your leader a chainsaw. Cut down the trees, make piles and planks of wood, and with them you can make two-storey houses that will be eaten by insects. When this happens, another tree will have grown where you desecrated the first one with the machine. You will be able to cut down this other tree and sell the planks because you have to buy food and subsistence. And because all humans are orphans, there is no truth in the world. You have to hunt down these fantasies and transform all raw materials into useful things, because in the end, Paradise is an invention; what exists is nothing but an aggressive flimsy lack of the meaning of existence; and since I have abandoned you, first invent that which allows you to desecrate everything that can be sacred, earth and sky, nail and hammer”.  

Artist Bio

João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva, both born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1979 and 1977 respectively, are Portuguese artists whose collaborative practice spans film, installation, sculpture, and photography. They delve into themes such as perception, time, and existential inquiries. Employing analog film techniques, they create enigmatic narratives blurring reality and fiction. One notable series includes “hypnotic” films, where ordinary scenes become mesmerizing through manipulation of light, sound, and motion. Their art has been showcased internationally in museums, galleries, and biennials, with participation in events such as the Venice Biennale and documenta.

Themes: extraction, transport, infrastructure

Category: Events

Balkin

Amy Balkin

Technosol Library

Technosols are soils that are more likely to be contaminated than other soils, and whose “properties and pedogenesis are dominated by their technical origin.” 

Anyone impacted by the production of technogenous soils may contribute a sample to the library.

Each soil sample will form a research volume existing across two sites:

  1. As housed in the library proposed for Gallery 8 (see image) 

and

  1. In situ with the perimeter to be designated by the contributor.

The site where soil has been drawn will be inscribed with a plaque, perimeter boundary, cement cap or other appropriate marker, depending on the specific hazards of the site. 

Prototype submissions might include spolic technosols from Francistown in Botswana, Al-Fe-humus soils impacted by sulphur dioxide and heavy metals from copper-nickel smelters in the Kola Subarctic, Russia, or colombite and tantalite (coltan) pegmatite-soil mixtures from Gatumba, Rwanda.

Guidelines for safe storage and handling of the volumes will be developed, owing to the hazards of shipping, handling, viewing, and storing toxic, infectious, and radioactive materials.

“Technosols comprise a new RSG and combine soils whose properties and pedogenesis are dominated by their technical origin. They contain a significant amount of artefacts (something in the soil recognizably made or extracted from the earth by humans), or are sealed by technic hard rock (material created by humans, having properties unlike natural rock). They include soils from wastes (landfills, sludge, cinders, mine spoils and ashes), pavements with their underlying unconsolidated materials, soils with geomembranes and constructed soils in human-made materials. Technosols are often referred to as urban or mine soils. They are recognized in the new Russian soil classification system as Technogenic Superficial Formations.”

Artist Bio

Amy Balkin, an American artist based in San Francisco and a Stanford University alumna, challenges conventional notions of the public domain through her interdisciplinary practice. Her work combines research and social critique to explore human interactions with social and material landscapes. Notable projects include “Invisible-5,” an audio commentary on land use along the San Francisco-Los Angeles highway corridor, investigating environmental justice issues. Balkin’s “Public Smog” challenges current laws on property ownership and pollution, aiming to expose their limitations. Additionally, her ongoing project, “A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting,” collects items from places threatened by climate change, offering a global account of shared experiences. Through these endeavors, Balkin seeks to create a physical shared space with society while addressing pressing environmental and social concerns.

Themes: data, information, cartography

ruins, waste, technofossils

Category: Archives

Almárcegui

Rock of Spitsbergen

Lara Almárcegui

Rocks of Spitsbergen is a project produced with the intention of going further down and deepening the reflexion on the territory, the past and the origin of “the built”. A nearly impossible project, Rocks of Spitsbergen is an attempt to identify all the rocks of one Artic Island of 39.000 km2.

The list of rocks in Rocks of Spitsbergen refers to the island’s past, when the region was shaped by the collision of tectonic plates, forming mountains, and sediments were deposited, producing rocks. The work comments on the ways the island territory has changed – and been changed – as a result of geological evolution and mining. The island has a long history of mining with many attempts to extract its abundant ores. There have been drilling expeditions in the search for copper, asbestos, zinc ore, iron, gold, lead and phosphates. With estimated coal deposits of some 22 million tons, the area around Longyearbyen has two active mines, and further extraction will start soon. The main aim of the project is therefore to focus on the future of the island. What will happen to the region if its rocks are extracted for minerals. The work offers a vision of the island’s possible destruction through an exploration of its geological origins and future exploitation.

Themes: extraction, transport, infrastructure

Category: Archives