Energy and Raw Material

The first installment of “Art In The Age Of...” at Witte de With focuses on how forms of energy and raw material shape, or are narrated by, contemporary artistic practices.

Nicholas Mangan, <i>Talk About the Weather (Additional Subtraction Problems)</i>, 2010, collaged newsprint, courtesy of the artist and LABOR Mexico City

Witte de With kicks off its 25th anniversary with “Art In The Age Of...”, a three-part presentation series that investigates future vectors of art production in the 21st century, highlighting the circulation of art and its underlying economies rather than its territorial location, its spread and infectious expanse rather than its arrest within narrowly defined genealogies and media.

These presentations focus on the role of raw materials, destruction, and computation within art’s creation and its dispersal. With the core question: how does the creation of art relate to the flow of energy, or to algorithms; which infrastructures will it be parasiting in the 21st century?

<b>Top</b>: Nicholas Mangan, <i>Talk About the Weather (Additional Subtraction Problems)</i>, 2010, collaged newsprint, courtesy of the artist and LABOR Mexico City (detail). <b>Above</b>: Marlie Mul, <i>Puddle (Shallow Smear)</i>, 2014, courtesy Croy Nielsen (Berlin), photographer Joachim Schulz, courtesy of the artist — **Top**: Nicholas Mangan, *Talk About the Weather (Additional Subtraction Problems)* (detail), 2010, collaged newsprint, courtesy of the artist and LABOR Mexico City. **Above**: Marlie Mul, *Puddle (Shallow Smear)*, 2014, courtesy Croy Nielsen (Berlin), photographer Joachim Schulz, courtesy of the artist

The first installment focuses on how forms of energy and raw material shape, or are narrated by, contemporary artistic practices. Since early times art objects have drifted with the motion and transformation of raw materials like wheat, minerals, and cotton. How does contemporary art relate to geo- thermal energy? To oil, gas, or alternative sources such as the sun? Could it even fly on rays of cosmic energy?

The installation Strobank by artist duo MAP Office examines wheat, its distribution and symbolic capital, alongside a history of the stock market’s trading pit. Nina Canell mediates upon the loss of information and energy that occurs during processes of transference in her sculptural constellation of stumps and cross-sections of telecommunication and power cables, each becoming sentences cut-off mid flow or instances of material forgetfulness.

<b>Left</b>: Nicholas Mangan, <i>Talk About the Weather (Deepwater Horizon)</i>, 2010, collaged newsprint, courtesy of the artist and LABOR Mexico City. <b>Right</i>: Nicholas Mangan, <i>Talk About the Weather (Still Life / Frozen Assets)</i>, 2010, collaged newsprint, courtesy of the artist and LABOR Mexico City. — **Left**: Nicholas Mangan, *Talk About the Weather (Deepwater Horizon)*, 2010, collaged newsprint, courtesy of the artist and LABOR Mexico City. **Right**: Nicholas Mangan, *Talk About the Weather (Still Life / Frozen Assets)*, 2010, collaged newsprint, courtesy of the artist and LABOR Mexico City.

In Children of Unquiet, Mikhail Karikis interweaves sound recordings of geothermal activity and industry in Larderello, Italy, with a cinematic and cultural history of Dante’s Inferno, whose vision of hell was inspired by that very location. Anton Vidokle’s This is Cosmos turns its eyes to the stars and charts the Cosmism movement in Russia and its disavowal of death through cosmic energy, positing the medium of film itself as an irradiation treatment.

Through image and archive, Celine Condorelli addresses the relationship between Egypt’s cotton industry and its nationalization after Nasser’s revolution. Zircon, a 4,400-million-year-old mineral is excavated, dematerialized and reanimated in Nicholas Mangan’s A World Undone, whilst material is mapped to stock market fluctuations in Talk About the Weather. In Marlie Mul’s sculptural series Puddles, messy dark matter glistens and seeps, contaminated by human interaction.

Anton Vidokle, This is Cosmos, 2014, video still, courtesy of the artist

Left: MAP Office, The Oven of Straw at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2013, courtesy UCCA, Beijing. Right: Mikhail Karikis, Production Photograph, 2013, from the project Children of Unquiet (2013-2014), 430 x 373 cm, courtesy of the artist

Nina Canell, Brief Syllables (detail), 2014, telecommunication and power cables, wood, steel, Courtesy Daniel Marzona, Mother’s Tankstation and Galerie Wien Lukatsch

23 January – 3 May 2015
Opening: Thursday 22 January 2015, 5.00 pm
Art In The Age Of…
Energy and Raw Material
With: Nina Canell, Celine Condorelli, Mikhail Karikis, Nicholas Mangan, MAP Office, Marlie Mul, and Anton Vidokle
curated by Natasha Hoare
conceived by Defne Ayas
Witte de With
Witte de Withstraat 50, Rotterdam

Energy and Raw Material

The first installment of “Art In The Age Of...” at Witte de With focuses on how forms of energy and raw material shape, or are narrated by, contemporary artistic practices.

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