As soon as visitors enter the Kunstpavillon, they are met by a light- and air-sensitive sculpture made of natural rubber and steel by artist Kaja Clara Joo, which is part of the multimedia installation Signar Taupe. Like a relic from times gone by, it is slightly reminiscent of a drilling auger from the oil industry. The stretched latex skin, for which Joo drew liquid latex from burnt plastic, gives the auger an organic, carnal feel and thus references the lustful desire of the eponymous art-figure Signar Taupe, who falls in love with an oil drilling auger in the story in the artist’s book. The protagonist is representative of a younger, restless generation, and the object of her desire – oil – has characterised this post-industrial generation like no other raw material.
The physical attraction portrayed between the young woman and the machine, in which ‘the auger [bores], not into the earth, but into her body’1, symbolises the blurred boundaries between inside and outside, technology and man, machine and nature. The writhing oil auger is complemented by photographic editions and a multi-channel video installation.
To produce the editions, Kaja Clara Joo developed images of real boreholes from Slovakia and Germany on aluminium using an analogue emulsion. These are geological scans of excavated boreholes, their aesthetics reminiscent of X-ray images or other medical imaging whereby a probe penetrates deep layers – just as the auger digs into her flesh in the protagonist’s imagination. The images in the photo edition oscillate with deliberate ambiguity between human organs and earth. The 4-channel video installation is similar, showing both professional and amateur shots of water, gas and oil pipes: Pipes that define our existence and our everyday life. While the images are almost indistinguishable from endoscopic images for a layperson initially, it becomes clear towards the end of the video installation that these are infrastructures. The effect of the siren-like sound is threatening, alerting us to the acute deterioration of our environment, triggered by human beings’ violent intrusion into their surroundings.
In Signar Taupe, the artist employs various media to depict and shape the convergence between living, amorphous entities and the imaging devices that we use to construct, depict and shape our political and social environment. The installation comprises an entity spanning a narrative space that tells of the intertwining of technology, nature and society, and reflects our powerlessness in face of global oil and energy policy.
The love story between Signar Taupe and the oil auger, on which the installation is based, reminds one of the obsessive, at times lascivious science-fiction story Crash by J.G. Ballard (made into a film by David Cronenberg in 1996), in which the protagonists fall in love with machines and the bodies they have deformed. Kaja Clara Joo’s story utilises the potential of the science-fiction genre, which Ursula Le Guin sees as an attempt to describe what is in fact going on; what people actually do and feel, and how people relate to everything else – to diverse temporalities and occurrences.2
The second position in the exhibition deals with the virulent state of our environment and the climatic consequences of unrestricted extractivism, and with how these issues can be recounted. In the installation work Slo-mo Visions of Refusal of Unfulfilled Promises in the rear section of the Kunstpavillon, Vik Bayer follows the theory of artist and author Gary Zhexi Zhang in Catastrophe Time! and turns, therefore, to those moments in which reality loses its grip, and the temporalities we take for granted are radically disrupted or even emerge as fantasies. In Catastrophe Time!, ultimately, it is about sampling the temporal practices and operative fictions already playing out within society, and striving for alternative ways of thinking, feeling and acting.3 On this basis, Bayer focuses on agricultural practices that, in the face of climate crisis, are seeking to develop solidarity-based economies as an alternative to extractivist systems. Part of the installation is a 2-channel video projection accompanying an agricultural consortium in Sicily.
The consortium comprises an association of farmers who set their selling prices collectively before the start of the harvest season, so stabilising the value of their products and providing more security for the farmers involved, who are facing increasingly difficult conditions due to climate change, since they can no longer rely on traditional, tried-and-tested cultivation methods in their work. Climate protection and respect take centre stage. The concept of co-production, in which use of land and financial resources are shared, is complemented by an economic model based on trust, and loans are not obtained from a banking institution but from the customers. The consortium’s own emergency relief fund also compensates for any crop failures and land losses resulting from the climate crisis. The harvested products are purchased by collectives in a spirit of solidarity, with the individual farmers contributing whatever they can. Not only yields and profits, but also risks and losses are shared. In this way, the consortium creates a counter-model to the risk-based economy of turbo-capitalism and opposes what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten define as the ‘ephemeral public sphere’: The ephemeral public sphere passes through the public and the private, through the state and the economy, and is not recognisable from its bad debts, but only from its bad debtors.4
Slo-mo Visions of Refusal of Unfulfilled Promises allows different levels of reality to shine through, thus staging their inherent multi-temporality. Vik Bayer expresses this as follows: ‘Simultaneity, tension, interruption and different speeds become central motifs of the installation.’ Multiple temporalities can be experienced through abrupt interruptions – scenes of seagulls in the smoke break through the narrative like moments of disruption hinting at impending catastrophe.
Bayer understands time as an infrastructure that, as in the example of the ‘expired’ traditional cultivation methods, becomes manifest and makes those structures perceptible through crises that we are no longer aware of in our everyday lives. In the installation, temporality and crisis take on a form that is also expressed in Bayer’s spatial practice: green shade-nets, which are generally used to protect plants from too much light and heat in greenhouses, together with tarpaulins, bathe Bayer’s spatial installation in a greenish light, creating visual references to the outside space and producing a kind of third projection of natural light on the gallery walls.
This sculptural-spatial method uncovers the exhibition space and its hidden areas by making the underlying structures visible and breaking down the distinction between background and foreground. The outside is brought into the room: the environment in the exhibition space is extended by our view of the tree tops in the courtyard garden. Weather conditions and sunlight are not incidental; they are elements of the installation.
Slo-mo Visions of Refusal of Unfulfilled Promises is completed with small sculptural elements from the artistic development and production processes scattered around the Kunstpavillon. The sculptural-like projectors of the video, for example, are part of the installation in the space, as are the crates whose dimensions were modelled on those of the consortium, and are partly incomplete – still in the making – and equipped with original parts from the consortium’s crates. Some of the boxes are marked ‘Fragile’ to emphasise the frailty of current ecological and economic structures. In contrast to the film – in which Bayer never shows the fire directly to avoid turning the catastrophe into a spectacle – it is used as a physical component of the installation: a sculptural tool for both the crates and the hot-dip galvanised steel uprights5 of the projection screens. Another blank in the film that gains a formal translation in the physical space is any direct reference to the consortium itself, traces of which are transposed into the exhibition space via the name and a reference to its members on original stickers.
The exhibition Tipping Point Phantoms unites two different forms of narration occurring in the shadow of the tipping point of self-destruction, and brings to light the multiple temporalities of our ecological emergency without falling into a state of despair and helplessness in face of the impending catastrophe.
Exhibition: Vik Bayer & Kaja Clara Joo – Tipping Point Phantoms
Curatorial support: Bettina Siegele
Exhibition duration: 14.02. – 17.05.2025
Address and contact:
Künstler:innen Vereinigung Tirol*
Kunstpavillon
Rennweg 8a, 6020 Innsbruck
www.kuveti.at
- Kaja Clara Joo, SIGNAR TAUPE: Des Maulwurfs Signatur, p. 19. ↩︎
- Ursula Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (Ignota, 2019), p.37. ↩︎
- Gary Zhexi Zhang, Catastrophe Time! (London: Strange Attractor Press, 2023), p. 7. ↩︎
- Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Die Undercommons: flüchtige Pla- nung und schwarzes Studium, ed. By Isabell Lorey (Wien, Linz, Berlin, London, Zurich: transversal texts, 2016), p. 70. ↩︎
- In collaboration with Michael Reindel ↩︎