Cutting Corners Creates More Sides
A spoken text …rummages through piles of surplus; boxed accouterments and that unaccounted for miscellanea… and the uneasiness of language itself as it grapples with the whereabouts of the necessary words. The narrative debris morphs through manifolds of optical glass with each utterance marking points along the way. On a long, black tableaux two cameras with little or no depth of field, sentence by sentence cut through a mysterious world of a seemingly inconsequential lineup of objects, tools, parts, bits and the unidentifiable forgotten –whatever might have been close at hand becomes enfolded in a richly colored crystalline doppelgänger image. For each sentence and “drilling” through the objects, the cameras’ parallaxes have been adjusted for a different cross section—the point where momentarily a continuous horizontal view is possible only to then quickly deconstruct as quickly as it formed. The object/installation itself is a self-contained self-reflexive mobile surface complete with positional projectors and screens and a narrow black “runway” of sorts reflecting the initial process of recording.

توماس هيرشهورن
托马斯·赫塞豪恩
תומס הירשהורן
トーマス·ヒルシュホルン
abschlag

Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Abschlag” installation, which occupies the first room on the main floor, offers a lesson in how not to engage with the Russian milieu: the Swiss artist constructed part of a typical Petersburg apartment block out of cardboard inside the full-height space, ripped off its façade, and deposited the refuse at its base, revealing shabby interiors lined with original avant-garde masterpieces (on loan from the nearby Russian Museum) by the likes of Malevich and El Lissitky. The references allude to a politically radical Russian past; the construction debris acts as a metaphor for history. Though Hirschhorn suggests a recovery of the revolutionary communist spirit of the 1920s, he falls prey to a historically revisionist fetish: citing the Russian avant-garde as a generative point for vanguard culture in the West, and offering it as a source for renewed progressivism in Russia. Hirschhorn seems woefully unaware of the Putin government’s branding campaign, one that aims to sell the Russian avant-guard as a nationalist movement in line with the regime’s own values (perhaps he didn’t watch the Sochi opening ceremony). Hirschhorn ultimately proves Zhilayev right — with its political pretenses, “Abschlag” aspires to make a grand gesture against conservatism, but fails because its critique has already been co-opted..
.

rove (Demoscene)

Farbrausch, also farb-rausch, is a German demo group that has been very well known in the Demoscene since the release of their intro fr-08: .the .product in December 2000. Their demo fr-025: the.popular.demo, which was published at Breakpoint 2003, has gained notoriety far beyond the borders of the scene, both The.Popular.Demo and debris. are two of the most popular demos according to the comparative index Pouët. The works of farbrausch have won numerous prizes in the Demoscene: The.Popular.Demo won the “Public Choice Award” of the Scene.org awards in 2003 Scene.org awards of 2003, category “Public Choice Award”., .Debris 2007 the award for best director. Scene.org awards of the year 2007, category Director.Farbrausch gives all publications a “product code” in the format “fr-0 #”. The numbers are not related to the date of publication, but rather, according to the members of farbrausch, indicate the order in which work on the project began. Productions that are not meant to be taken seriously are also given a “minus” in their name. 2004 the sub-department of farbrausch .theprodukkt released a 96kB small first-person shooter called .kkrieger, as well as the early version of a tool for creating demos called.

Electro-cución
“I am fascinated with the physicality of low-tech manual devices and mechanical systems. I am aroused by their shapes, sounds, and gestures, which are beautiful descriptions of their own functions. Industrial materials—stainless steel, aluminum, titanium, plastics, and rubbers—seduce me. Artifacts of disappearing industry, I find strange and beautiful shapes in their debris that allude to sexual operations, violent actions, mysterious purposes. Their potential triggers my thought process.”

Ruins can be preserved, or they can offer debris from which to build. It is with such wreckage that Vienna-based artist and fashion designer Anna-Sophie Berger creates work: Her practice is not fashion or art but a bricolage built upon collisions of the two—a product of a time when these industries seek to establish market-driven “synergy” but remain discrete.

Temporary Encampment (Five Blue Solids)

The precarious installations of Nina Canell (born 1979 in Växjö, Sweden, lives and works in Berlin, Germany) could be read as essays on changeability and uncertainty. Hinged upon a fabric of electromagnetics, her communities of objects quietly interact with each other through modest arrangements, balancing careful ambitions to sustain certain frequencies, movements or altitudes. Electrical debris, wires and neon gas establish temporary, almost performative sculptural unions with natural findings such as water, wood or stones, yielding open-ended moments of synchronicity. An improvisational methodology and a flexibility of form highlight Canell’s quest for sculpture, which exists somewhere in between the material and the immaterial, forming and questioning the conductive relations between solid objects and mental events.
.

spinning heads

Noble and Webster produce silhouetted self-portraits through carefully constructed mounds of rubbish and debris illuminated at one precise angle, transforming the abstract pieces into figurative composites. Each sculptural installation represents this duality of art and also references the duality of man. Things appear to be far more complex than what first meets the eye. Whether you first notice the figurative shadow or the abstract wood piles, there is always the other to view second as its other half.

debris

ケリーリチャードソン
켈리 리처드슨
קלי ריצ’רדסון/
凯利·理查森
mariner 9
Mariner 9 presents a panoramic view of a Martian landscape set hundreds of years into the future, littered with the rusting remains from various missions to the planet. Despite its suggested abandoned state, several of the spacecraft continue to partially function, to do their intended jobs, to ultimately find signs of life, possibly transmitting the data back to no one.
Mariner 9 was created using scenery-generation software employed by the film and gaming industries in combination with technical data from NASA’s missions to Mars to produce a faithful artist’s rendering of Martian terrain, populated by the debris from centuries of exploration through real and imagined spacecraft in the centre of a duststorm. “Cinematic tropes of sci-fi films abound, but any search for a clear narrative is frustrated. Presented with minimal action, we wonder instead about the search for life beyond our own planet and the simultaneous destruction of life on earth.” (Laurel MacMillan, Programmer for TIFF Future Projections)

Human Debris