Tracing Obsolescence

curated by Evelyn Owen

Tahir Karmali, Stargazer, 2017.
Tracing Obsolescence brings together four artists who explore the material and psychic traces left by declining industrial-scale manufacturing and extraction. Through printmaking, sculpture, installation, and performance, they attend to goods that have been discarded, places that are abandoned, and memories that seem forgotten. In so doing, they question the finality of obsolescence, reactivating materials and intervening in processes of deterioration in order to investigate contemporary environmental, socio-economic, and geo-political crises.

Tahir Karmali explores abusive mining practices in Africa, as well as disposable consumerism; he ritually deconstructs discarded technologies such as old mobile phones to obtain substances like cobalt and copper, disrupting their typical path toward the trash heap. Sto Len makes monoprints directly from the polluted waterways of New York City’s Newtown Creek, drawing attention to environmental problems of urban post-industrial wastelands by repurposing their effluence in-situ as an artistic medium. Selasi Awusi Sosu uses video and sound to create ghostly holographic re-stagings of the now defunct glass bottle manufacturing process in Ghana, while Dana Whabira’s installation highlights the rise of automation and the fall of machinery, technology and people that have become redundant or terminated.

Together, these artists’ works propose non-linear, context-embedded ways of tracing obsolescence in post-industrial landscapes, revealing material circuits and trajectories which may be redirected to create unexpected, problematic, and mysterious beauty.

  • artists:
    Tahir Karmali
    Sto Len
    Selasi Awusi Sosu
    Dana Whabira
Evelyn Owen is a writer and curator based in New York City. A cultural geographer by training, her research explores contested geographical imaginations, especially in relation to contemporary art from Africa and its Diaspora. She is currently the Curatorial Fellow at The Africa Center, NYC. Her writing has been published by The Guardian, FOAM, Contemporary&, Okayafrica, 1-54, and Africa is a Country. She received her PhD with a thesis on the geographies of contemporary African art from Queen Mary, University of London.




 
apexart’s program supporters past and present include the National Endowment for the Arts, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, the Kettering Family Foundation, the Buhl Foundation, The Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Spencer Brownstone, the Kenneth A. Cowin Foundation, Epstein Teicher Philanthropies, The Greenwich Collection Ltd., William Talbott Hillman Foundation/Affirmation Arts Fund, the Fifth Floor Foundation, the Consulate General of Israel in New York, The Puffin Foundation, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, public funds from Creative Engagement, supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Governor and administered by LMCC, funds from NYSCA Electronic Media/Film in Partnership with Wave Farm: Media Arts Assistance Fund, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.