Many artists in this conceptually rich show curated by Ruba Katrib and Sheldon Gooch show a taste of a once-penny gadget that has since been downgraded to a dump, and is now outdated. An unruly combination of outstanding sculptor Ser Serpas has a television set whose back has been removed to reveal the tangle of the tour. Now, its frame is exquisitely balanced on a dirty rolling chair in the corner of the gallery. Jean Katambayi Mukendi also has a TV Trash TV (2022), sculpture, whose screen is not formed by TV material but truck windshield, he has used painkillers, cassette tapes, clocks, rulers, etc. Selma Selman shows a bunch of computer towers, she tores to get enough gold to form a nail, here being driven to the walls of the PS1 and displayed as the sculpture itself. All these artists subvert the typical use of the objects they find, repositioning them so that we can start thinking about why it is even possible to reject them altogether.
Each of these works responded to the global economy that consumed expensive commodities in the global north, and then used unnecessary waste as a by-product. Often, garbage returns to the global south, and their citizens discover new uses. Karimah Ashadu Brown products (2020), Nigerian immigrant Emeka, who lives in Hamburg, can be seen traveling through a bunch of tires, looking for goods resold in the German city of Billstrasse, some of which are evidence of social decay being claimed by certain evidence of West African immigration activities. “No one is really happy to see all these goods exported to Africa because all of them are rubbish,” Emeka said in the video. He noted that he turned to vending waste because he couldn’t find a job in Germany because he lacked a visa. The video shows that one person’s waste is another’s financial lifespan.
A man scouring a junkyard as a form of survival sounds like the stuff of sci-fi, but the apocalypse is now in “The Gatherers,” which features many works that look like wreckage—most notably a glorious installation by Tolia Astakhishvili in which one room of PS1 is made to look like a squatter’s nest, with graspitied temporary walls, dusty fire extinguishers, and plugged-in devices of unpublished features.
However, given that some of the artists here function more like an alchemist, this clever show is not all doom and melancholy, which transforms the remaining characters of the ever-changing world into something new. For example, miho dohi is represented by several sculptures formed from assembled materials to form organ-like forms. In one, the coils of fabric and metal springs look like the gut, and you may find a healthy, fully functional presence.
As of October 6, at 22-25 Jackson Avenue.
