Miguel Soto has worked together with a student
from the Art Academy of Zagreb Natan Sudec, to convert found rock cores into a
design for a space heater. Living in Santiago de Chile, Soto first encountered
these cores when his grandmother came back to Croatia after migrating to Chile
during the Frist World War. On arriving, she realised she owned a property on
the peninsula of Pelješac and drilled the cores to see if the property could be
exploited for minerals. By shaping these cores into old designs of radiators,
Soto creates a material narrative between the stone and the common objects they
create which become part of the local visual vernacular.

Ana Alenso has worked consistently with the
theme of oil extraction and its link to “resource curse.” The curse is the
common trend that minerally rich countries often fall victim to intense
political corruption, mafias, and even warlords who vie for control of
productive areas. Originally from Venezuela where a national crisis continues
at the expense of the population, Alenso has investigated a scandal linked with
a succession of events around 2014 in which fracking was intended for the
Adriatic. Tracing the line of events from oil and gas companies such as INA and
MOL, to specific politicians, and the activists who stopped the structures, the
installation references the precarity and constant work that goes into
preservation of the common good. Using recycled and found materials from Zagreb
waste plants, the sculptural installation references the craze for extraction
that often irreversibly damages resources of much greater value.

In the black box room of GMK four films will be
projected in loop that diversify the topic of society’s connection to material
phenomena. From fire and invisible toxins to lithium and gold, the films follow
material in relation to the body, the psyche, and human environments.

Callum Hill, Crowtrap, 2018, 15’, intertwines
the stories of two men whose tendencies to pyromania connect them in their
material relation to the world. Filmed across the UK and Germany, the film
connects current geopolitical tensions with parallel lives. One character
presides over a coal yard separated from the outside by fragments of the Berlin
Wall. His life and relation to fire is contrasted by a heather-burner in North
Yorkshire. Their common experience of historical event is narrated by the
artist and unfolds through references to art history and labour.

Alina Manukyan, The Precious Metal Stays Noble,
2016, 10’12” draws attention to gold’s central role in the exchange of objects
within society. This metal which has historically been coveted due to religious
and cultural processes becomes a stable element to hoard and save. The metal
adorns the human body both outside and becoming one with it. The film shows the
metal receiving devotion, being implanted, but also melted down from objects to
its pure liquid value. Speculating as to whether gold’s economic value can be
destabilised, the film questions its inherent chemical makeup and pre-human
existence.

Alejandra Prieto, Lithium, 2019 is filmed in the
salt plains of Northern Chile and Bolivia where large percentages of the
world’s lithium is mined. This mineral is used in everyday electronic and
hand-held devices. The invisible material is carried in our pockets everyday.
It is also ingested in the form of pills as a stabilising cure for bipolar
disorder. The chemical compound connects the human psyche to electronic
hardware and some of the most desolate landscapes on earth.

Matthew C. Wilson, Geological Evidences, 2017,
13’ addresses the current uncertainty about the future of humans on earth in
the face of climate change. An unclear and unsettling relationship between the
past, present, and future haunts a landscape that at times seems like another
planet, the contemporary moment seen through non-human eyes, or a
post-apocalyptic earth. Geological Evidences was filmed in Schöningen, Germany,
in and around an archaeological excavation where pre-Homo sapiens hominids
organized socially to hunt paleolithic horses and extract their energy dense
bone marrow. The immediate area also includes the open-cast coal mine within
which the archaeological excavation is located, an exhausted and backfilled
coal mine, a coal-burning power plant and its waste-water pool. Shot in
infrared – a radiation emitted by the earth and trapped by greenhouse gasses as
well as by the body as a result of metabolism – the film images landscape
shaped by the primordial and on-going drive for energy dense fuels.