In 1969, the American conceptual artist Robert Barry performed his INERT GAS SERIES in the California desert. Once released, the gases naturally expanded and dispersed while maintaining their chemical integrity. More specifically, the work refers to Barry’s “INERT GAS SERIES: HELIUM. Sometime during the morning of March 5, 1969, 2 cubic feet of Helium will be released into the atmosphere.”
Thirty-eight years later, Hornek asks a person in the same desert: “Please inhale Robert Barry"s noble gases and hold them as long as you can.” According to the physical computation commissioned by the artist, around 130,000 helium atoms per m3 of Barry’s sculpture remain. Through the air currents, the large elemental sculpture makes a claim on the global atmosphere. During a work stay in Mongolia, which is almost at the same latitude as California and characterized by a similar desert landscape, she presented her work to a Mongolian nomad. Claiming that she knew the »original« site, the Mongolian led the journey to the southern Gobi.
To Inhale Robert Barry’s Noble Gases and Hold Them As Long As You Can
Two-channel video installation, 5 min, looped, Mojave Desert (USA), Gobi (Mongolei), scientific computation, 2008
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In 1969, the American conceptual artist Robert Barry performed his INERT GAS SERIES in the California desert. Once released, the gases naturally expanded and dispersed while maintaining their chemical integrity. More specifically, the work refers to Barry’s “INERT GAS SERIES: HELIUM. Sometime during the morning of March 5, 1969, 2 cubic feet of Helium will be released into the atmosphere.”
Thirty-eight years later, Hornek asks a person in the same desert: “Please inhale Robert Barry"s noble gases and hold them as long as you can.” According to the physical computation commissioned by the artist, around 130,000 helium atoms per m3 of Barry’s sculpture remain. Through the air currents, the large elemental sculpture makes a claim on the global atmosphere. During a work stay in Mongolia, which is almost at the same latitude as California and characterized by a similar desert landscape, she presented her work to a Mongolian nomad. Claiming that she knew the »original« site, the Mongolian led the journey to the southern Gobi.
Katrin HornekKatrin 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
STUDIO
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mail@katrinhornek.net
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
DESIGN: dontcry.work
CODE: reisenbauer & balcinovic - diagnosticdigitalism.net
all content and work © Katrin Hornek, 2022
translations: Brían Hanrahan, Katrin Hornek