Super Anxious Custodians of Disaster

For 10 days, 4 artists came together to build an exhibition in real time. They brought works and practices into contact, and allowed materials and ideas to contaminate one another. Their shared concerns range from consumer excess and disposability of materials, to disintegrating democracies and the fear of systemic collapse. They respond through making: playfully, anxiously, stubbornly, and together. The gallery is less white cube, more adult serious sandpit of experimentation and dialogue.

Nina Rodin, Irmak Canevi, Zeynep Deniz Çalışkan and Kerem Ozan Bayraktar worked together in the exhibition space in Basel, their existing works allowed to interact while they made something new. Ideas, materials and practices interfere, accumulate and generate. The starting point is an uncomfortable contradiction: they are fascinated by the colourful, cheap, disposable things that surround us, while being deeply aware of the systems of production and consumption that make them possible. Anxious about ecological and political collapse, they are also suspicious of the idea that art can simply stand outside the systems it critiques.

They make things anyway.

Though it can seem self-indulgent, we remain addicted to making, so as not to be crushed. Art is a state of elsewhere, or a defiant act of resiliency.

Plastic, cardboard, clothing, packaging, found objects, images and everyday materials become things to collect, transform, repeat and play with. The artists are interested in what happens when these materials move between contexts, from useful object to waste then to artwork, from personal possession to shared resource, from celebration to evidence of what came before.

Can we turn around the oil tanker? Can we stop the locomotive from ploughing into its end station?

Across their individual practices, the four artists approach systems of accumulation and circulation from different directions. Rodin examines consumption through obsessive acts of documentation. Canevi builds playful, precarious worlds from salvaged and mass produced materials. Çalışkan looks at how objects and their images circulate between people and contexts. Bayraktar examines environments shaped by congestion, accumulation, and suspension.

Together, they produce a temporary ecosystem: anxious, colourful, excessive, joyful, maximalist. There is pleasure in the making, and perhaps there is hope in making together. In a world full of things, the artists ask, what happens when we make one more thing together?

With our eyes open but trying not to look over the edge, we place ourselves across the chasm that is opening under our feet as Super Anxious Custodians of Disaster.