Manifesta9: Coal > Rubbish (Part 1)
Manifesta9 is definitely all about coal. Based in the former coal mining building in Waterschei, Genk (Limburg, Belgium) the curator Cuauhtémoc Medina, with associate curators Katerina Gregos and Dawn Ades, have gone OTT on the theme of coal for the ninth edition of the peripatetic European Biennial of Contemporary Art. If featured works aren’t directly about coal as material, they’re about industry and post-industrial capitalism. The historical narrative of coal as a response to the site were the context and content of this single-site exhibition, with coal heritage and a coal mining museum and documentaries about coal writ large.
The works of particular interest to me were incidentally not directly related to coal and (not surprisingly) featured discarded/waste objects and materials.
Ni Haifeng’s Para Production (2008-2012) is a large scale, participatory work inviting visitors to collectively machine stitch fabric remnants together to form a huge, seemingly still non-functional, patchwork hanging. The obvious rubbish connection is the use of discarded fabric. But discarded fabric has a resale value in the textile industry so are scraps and offcuts are arguably not all that rubbish.
Next, Martin Vanden Eynde’s Plastic Reef (2006-2012) made from discarded plastic that could be washed up beach rubbish is melded together to form a mass of more or less indistinguishable plastic items, the occasional fragment of object still identifiable. Resembling coral reefs that are threatened by pollution, Plastic Reef symbolises the pollution endangering it, overtaking it as the relatively new inhabitants of the sea.
Finally, a work that got my attention because of the process – hole-punching – one that I have employed myself extensively in various works so already have a particular perspective on it. In a performance installation Make a Molehill out of a Mountain (of Work) (2012) by Ante Timmermans (with the artist not present) shelves of reams of copier paper create a cell with a table and chair and a hole-punch placed on the table. Across from the paper cell is another desk/table with a small pile of hole punches. By themselves, these elements are not particularly interesting, but cabinet between them provide a new dimension. Sketch book pages depict various drawings some hole-punched parts and some featuring the small circular chads of hole-punched paper. One drawing in particular features a simple charcoal drawing of a mine with the bottom third of the page black. Holes have been punched from the black “ground” and displaced onto the white surface above in a pile and smudges and fingerprints of charcoal dirty the torn page as billows of smog from a crudely drawn chimney.
