P A C K E T - S O U P: In how much plastic do you swim every day?!
Exhibition 05.05.–02.06.2012
With Jan Kuck, Pamela Longobardi, Steve McPherson, Nathalie Fari, Yingmei Duan and Cai Qing, Susanne Richter, Werner Boote
Curation Claudia Lamas Cornejo
The art project Packet-Soup picks up the ecological problem of plastic waste in the oceans. In this context Jan Kuck installs a gigantic swimming pool, which is an allegory of the giant waste-soup we unconsciously swim in every day, and invites the visitors to fill this pool with plastic bags instead of water. Immersion–Drifting–Awareness–Collecting–Re-structuring are the key notions of the exhibition. Visitors may drift deeper into the works of the film director and author Werner Boote (Plastic Planet) and the documentary film producer Susanne Richter (ARTE, Der Kampf ums schwarze Gold), which will enrich the project with scientific and historic data.
Pamela Longobardi (Venice Biennial 2009) has been collecting plastic finds on beaches all over the world for several years. For Packet-Soup she re-structures them, thereby combining aesthetics with in depth content, playing with one’s awareness of the familiar–yet transformed and hardly recognizable. Steve McPherson structures the plastic troves he collected on the beaches of Great Britain to large sized charts and type-cases. His Undesirable Archive is hosted in SAVVY Contemporary’s most rear, but most challenging room.
Nathalie Fari, Yingmei Duan and Cai Qing will recycle their thoughts about sustainability, space and time in performative ways. “For me, sustainability begins with slow movement,” said Nathalie Fari. For their live performance, the artists will use the immediate urban environment of SAVVY Contemporary.
Hilla Steinert, who in a performance for the Venice Biennale in 2009 knitted a dress made of grass has now tailored a dress from her daily plastic residues for the opening of the exhibition, inspired by the Packet-Soup project.