Terminal Beach
MAK, Vienna
1 May — 11 August, 2024
Curated by Marlies Wirth
The eight-pod home of the British Antarctic Survey’s Halley VI,
Photo: Antony Dubber (British Antarctic Survey)
Digby Road, 2024
Halley Very Low Frequency (VLF) receiver,
Photo: Nigel Meredith, British Antarctic Survey
Still from computer animated droid with movements trained on a Kuka industrial robot
With the immersive spatial installation Terminal Beach, designed specifically for the MAK, the London-based artist collective Troika (Eva Rucki, Conny Freyer and Sebastien Noel) unfolds a dystopian scenery at the edge of time, at the end of natural life on Earth, and the interface of the virtual and the material world.
The eponymous animation film features a furry creature in a barren landscape chopping down what appears to be the last tree on earth. With its animalistic or humanoid appearance and smooth gestures, the dark fur-covered robot conveys a strangely familiar, uncanny feeling: the swing of the axe was recorded based on the movements of the artists using motion capture technology and then transferred to a robotic arm commonly used in the production industry.
The uncanny atmosphere is intensified by the acoustic setting reminiscent of birdsong and animal sounds. Yet what we hear is a geophony of the Earth’s natural radio emissions – signals generated by lightning strikes and geomagnetic storms from solar wind that have been recorded as radio waves by the British Antarctic Survey.
The title of the exhibition and video refers to J.G. Ballard’s collection of science fiction short stories The Terminal Beach (1964). They revolve around the bitter paradox of the extraordinary creative power of human imagination that seems to be only surpassed by its ruthless drive to destroy.
To the repetitive rhythm of thudding axe blows, the robot continues what humankind began long ago – the progressive destruction of our planet through fossil fuels, CO2 emissions and deforestation, the main causes of the climate crisis.
The narrative unfolds from different perspectives: through the cinematographic eye of the camera, the watchful eye of a drone from a bird’s eye view, from the viewpoint of the perpetrator himself, and finally from that of the tree, which perceives the events from within. The endless loop suspends the seemingly inevitable conclusion, inviting reflections on alternate endings.
The cinematic plot continues in the real exhibition space where a gathering of multiple sculptures emerges from a flooded, color-saturated landscape—enigmatic hybrid creatures that seem to be fleeing from the long-gone forest. They are “crossers” – mythical representations of beings who guard thresholds, gates or borders, like fauns, sphinxes, phoenixes and centaurs.
Thus, the artists expand the idea of liminality—a transitional state—in nature with three-dimensional collages and question the constructed landscape or “second nature” as a sphere created – and destroyed – by humankind
The works follow a series of sculptures for which the collective draws from its archive of digitized objects from museum collections – in the form of 3D-printed digital twins of historical museal objects that have been newly re-combined.
Selected objects from the MAK Collection were 3D-scanned for the “Heron Sphinx”: the wax model of a Sphinx, the so-called “zero pattern” for a casting mold for porcelain production from the archive of the Imperial and Royal Porcelain Manufactory (Vienna, 18th century), deformed by heat, and the bronze cast of a Heron with a Rhinoceros Beetle (Japan, 19th century), from the golden age of Japonism, a period in which bronze figures with nature motifs like birds, insects and plants were exported to Europe and the USA.
With this first solo exhibition in Austria, Troika focuses on the complex forms of non-human intelligence between technology and ecology and raises questions regarding the possible (mal)adaptation of living beings to climate change as well as the digital afterlives of human myths, culture, and history.
Read the text about the exhibition by Ada Karlbauer.
Terminal Beach
MAK, Vienna
1.5.–11.8.2024
A project of the MAK in the context of Klima Biennale Wien 2024
Curator: Marlies Wirth
Exhibition Management: Aleksandra Drozdowska
Assistence: Felix Kofler, MAK Design Collection
Graphic Design: Lisa Penz, David Gallo
Loans: Courtesy of the artists and max goelitz