RAUL WALCH – UNFOLLOW
2021-01-25Much of Walch’s practice is set against nature or urbanity that finds itself in a critical stage of transition. Like most of the materials used by Walch in his practice, individual elements that make up the artworks are repurposed-every object has breathed in open air outside of the white cube in some way. As such, the show charts out a line between two environmental polarities-at sea level, a coal mining factory in Lausitz and, 3,800 meters above and farther south, the glaciers of South Tyrol. In a short looping film called No One to Follow, the artist plots his way across these two disparate places: one, a site of “excellent” nature and, at the other, a site of resource-extraction and overt destruction. While the glacier appears to exemplify natural beauty, the sun is beaming down; to protect it from melting, a thick wooly fleece is draped across kilometers of ice. This juxtaposition of, on the one hand, an unnatural state of preservation and, on the other, one of bustling destruction shows that any ideation about the natural and the unnatural is paradoxical. In all cases, nature finds itself in a state of human-induced entropy; Profitability connects them.
Opposite – Leave It Under Ground, 2020
Exhibition runs through to February 6th, 2021
Galerie EIGEN + ART
Auguststraße 26
10117 Berlin
Germany
