Upstream – The Colorado River from Salton Sea to Glen Canyon

Katrin Hornek’s work playfully engages with the strange paradoxes and convergences of living in the age of the Anthropocene, that is, the new geologic epoch where the effects of capitalism, colonialism, and extractivism are written into the body of the earth. Both her artistic and her curatorial practice assert an understanding of the entwinement of nature and culture, implicitly arguing for more complex formulations, ones that reflect the ways in which our bodies, cultures, materials, and thoughts are all composed of the other creatures and rocks and air and water that make up our world. What Hornek highlights are the often uncomfortable juxtapositions between these things, and the ways in which we are both constituted and restrained by contemporary politics and materiality.

To be made up of the Earth is not necessarily easy, as the body stones of LÍTHOS (and especially the thought of passing them) demonstrate. Or to try to encourage the remains of long dead organisms in a séance, now morphed into oil and plastic, to speak to us in our present. What can we learn from those dead voices? And what might they tell us?

As an artistic strategy, Hornek follows the stories and traces of the material world, following the flow of discourse on plastic or the transformation of the environment. She explores this relation by tracing the development of the Colorado River system, highlighting the ways in which the river was used as a colonial and nation-building project through the »All-American« waterway. IF ARCHITECTURE COULD TALK shows the beautiful and unsettling ways in which the yurt figures as a cultural domain across Mongolia, juxtaposed with the often uncritical appropriation of this former nomadic architectural form by people in Austria. Tellingly, the documentary ends with one of the Mongolian speakers saying that “things go where the free market prevails.”

Hornek artfully, and with a critical eye, displays the many contradictions and failings in our conceptualizations of our place in the world, among this vast, proliferating network of other-than-humans and their demands. Throughout, Hornek insightfully engages with these sometimes difficult realities that work to engage the viewer and make us think again, while combatting naiveté and political depression.

Text: Heather Davis