A MAK exhibition
The exhibition CLIMATE PANDEMICS: Dark Euphoria takes science fiction literature, specifically climate fiction, as a starting point for artistic reflection. It plays with the genre's ability to link environmental themes to the experience of living in another world as if we were a part of that world and thus to evoke more intense emotional reactions than simply reading information about the causes and effects of climate change.
Two Vienna-based artists have been invited to develop new works for the exhibition. In her sculptural works molded in wax or gypsum, Kerstin von Gabain examines (human) bones, bone tools, animal-bone oracles, and the use of fossil bones to sequence the aDNA (ancient DNA) of long-extinct species. Ivan Pérard creates filigree 3-D print sculptures whose forms suggest fragments of mysterious, organic machines from a high-tech future. The artist is interested in the theory that molecular nanotechnology can replicate itself (Grey goo scenario).
Should this process get out of control, the result could be "ecophagy," the eating up of the biosphere and thus ultimately the annihilation of all life on earth. The exhibition shows the archaeology of a future that may never happen as such.
Subtitled “Dark Euphoria,” the project challenges the “thrill” [Angstlust] that fictional and mythological doomsday scenarios arouse in us. But climate fiction always contains a kernel of scientific truth ...
Artists: Kerstin von Gabain, Ivan Pérard
Curator: Marlies Wirth
Listen to the short story CLIMATE PANDEMICS by Marlies Wirth here
CREATIVE CLIMATE CARE GALLERY
MAK - Museum of Applied Arts, Stubenring 5, 1010 Vienna