150 x 90 x 3 cm, 12 minute continues loop
Executed in 2012, A World Undone revolves around a single, metaphorically rich substance, drawing on geological research into an ancient mineral, Zircon, unearthed in remote Western Australia. These rocks are now studied, like a time capsule, revealing intriguing clues about the state of the planet more than 4 billion years ago. Mangan procured a sample of the material and reduced it to a fine dust that he then filmed, in flux, with a high-speed video camera. Though drawing on ‘hard’ science and rooted in empirical techniques, the piece explores the aesthetic, philosophical and even mythological potential of cutting-edge geophysical research. Nicholas Mangan’s research-driven practice gives rise to films, videos, and installations dealing primarily with histories of contested sites and materials. A keen awareness of media and their own (art) histories informs his finished works. The unifying themes of Mangan’s oeuvre to date include the geopolitics and economics of energy, and histories of exchange and wealth, both timely issues in the era of ‘post-peak’ fossil fuels and neoliberal globalization. Much of Mangan’s research focuses on the geography of the Pacific Rim, an emerging pivot of the neo-colonial global economy which also harbors a certain unconscious of Euro-American anthropological and economic thought.
Facing one another, each projection screen of the work Food Fight respectively features Tobias Fike and Matthew Harris preparing multi-course meals at a kitchen counter...
Taiwan WMD (Taiwan and Weapons of Mass Destruction) is part of a long-term research started in early 2010 on the history and aftermath effects of Japanese biological and chemical warfare in China during WWII, as well as the unknown history of Taiwan’s nuclear program...
Photo-writing Sammy Baloji and Filip De Boeck in conversation with Dominique Malaquais “Starting from our own practice, a collaborative ‘photo-writing’ between a visual artist and an anthropologist, this presentation will reflect on the possibilities of combining various artistic and anthropological approaches and inroads into the city (in our own case this means the urban contexts of the Global South, in particular Central Africa)...