A Golden Spike
Online viewing room
A Golden Spike seeks to explore and counter the idea of nature as no more than the backdrop to human affairs.
‘The conception of the natural world on which sociology, political science, history, law, economics and philosophy have rested for two centuries – that of an inert standing reserve of resources, an unresponsive external backdrop
to the drama of human affairs – is increasingly difficult to defend. ‘ (1)
The title of the exhibition refers to the golden spike used by geologists to signify an internationally agreed upon point in strata that denotes the boundary of a geological time.
The Anthropocene is seen as a geological epoch when humans significantly impact on the planet, changing it irrecoverably. The start date of which is often given as 16 July 1945, the day of the Trinity nuclear test. However, it has been argued that this date ought to be revised to 1610, or the beginning of the colonial period
Looking beyond climate change, each artist in this exhibition has presented a complex engagement with the natural world, understanding cultural destruction, industrial decimation and the natural world as a living witness to colonial rule. Kiluanji Kia Henda’s Restless Landscape (2017) is a series of silkscreened montaged images of the landscape where one of the most intense battles in Africa took place in the 1990s, during the Angolan war. Here the artist explores the notion of plant life as witness to history.
During the dry season, rural Tanzania is covered in a blanket of red dust
which produces a myriad of monochromatic landscapes. For the video Vumbi, which means dust in kiswahili, Kapwani Kiwanga cleans away dust from foliage and engages in an act of subtractive painting. Kiwanga transposes a simple task from the domestic sphere into the natural environment and engages in a sisyphean action, for the foliage will quickly be buried under a new layer of dust. Alfredo Jaar’s series of lightbox photographs Gold in the Morning depicts the Serra Pelada opencast mine.
The pit, dug by human hands, is the result of a massive influx of over 80,000 self-employed miners to a remote part of northeastern Brazil. In 1985, Jaar travelled to Serra Pelada, and over the course of weeks, he documented the miners and their work. Jaar provides a portal into a hidden and unfamiliar place, dramatic in its scale and topography. In giving ‘visibility to those our world denies it to’, Jaar invites us to examine the social, cultural and political motivations for their labour and the ecological transformation of the mining site.
Agridoce (meaning ‘Bittersweet’) is a series by Haroon Gunn Salie and Aline Xavier which explores the land and people directly affected by the environmental disaster in Mariana, Brazil in 2015. An iron ore tilling dam in Minas Gerais collapsed, resulting in toxic flooding that destroyed the village of Bento Rodrigues and killed 19 people.
The project is in collaboration with locals who had their properties flooded with layers of mud and toxic heavy metals. In the photographs death, as well as the destruction of real estate and of the region’s ecosystem are the aftermath of the accident. Highly carcinogenic blue asbestos waste on the Owendale Asbestos Mine tailings dump, near Postmasburg, Northern Cape. The prevailing wind was in the direction of the mine officals’ houses at right. 21 December 2002 by
David Goldblatt explores the toxic destruction from mines in South Africa and their human impact.
Artworks
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