The thistle is always the first to return
2025
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Philipp Hindahl, SCHIRN MAG Monthly, April 2025

The thistle is always the first to return

Philipp Hindahl — [...] The notion of destruction and a new beginning is an old and powerful narrative. A relatively new history, however, is one that places the rudus, the rubble, in the center of things. Waste dumps, the edges of roads, forgotten houses, blocked streets, abandoned building sites, industry and mining, the ruins of buildings, in the cracks and holes in tarmac and reinforced steel: Weeds blossom in all of[…]
Pink Noise
2025
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Book, published by DISTANZ

Book, published by DISTANZ

TROIKA. PINK NOISE. Text by Dehlia Hannah & Nadim Samman, Daisy Hildyard & Nora N. Khan. Distanz 2025. English. – Pink Noise is Troika’s first monographic exhibition catalogue, released in conjunction with the eponymous exhibition at the Langen Foundation which features new productions as well as works from the past ten[…]
Above / Below
2025
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Daisy Hildyard, ‘Above/Below‘, in ‘Pink Noise‘, Distanz, 2025

‘Above/Below‘, Daisy Hildyard

For thousands of years before the advent of rapid global transport, people wondered why swallows vanished in winter, then reappeared in spring. In Europe, even in the nineteenth century, it was commonly understood that the birds would hide somewhere nearby, concealed so completely that no human could glimpse them. Perhaps they crept into the hollow enclosures within tree-trunks, or maybe they submerged themselves in the mud at the bottom of a pond or river and slept, breathing through some secret[…]
On Anima Atman
2025
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‘On Anima Atman‘, Nora N. Khan, in ‘Pink Noise‘, p. 123, Distanz, 2025

‘On Anima Atman‘, Nora N. Khan

In my garden, a grove of banana palms recently had two of its core trunks cut down. The palm leaves weighed heavy on the roof and routinely lurched over into the neighbour’s yard. In the days since the cut, the leaves of the remaining palms have started to turn, covering the stumps and exposed chips with restorative shadows. The fig tree, wildly intertwined with the palms, dropped further to cover the ground as we waited for it to heal. Each[…]
Untertage
2024
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Book, published by König Books

‘Untertage’

TROIKA. UNTERTAGE. Ed. by Fi Churchman. Text by Eva Wilson, Mark Rappolt & Ariane Koek. Cologne 2024. 17 x 23,5 cm. Buchhandlung Walther[…]
Pink Noise
2024
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’Pink Noise’, DISTANZ, 2024 Dehlia Hannah & Nadim Samman

’Pink Noise’

A cacophony of chirps, whistles, and buzzing greets visitors to the Langen Foundation. Emanating from a tree at the centre of its exterior Rotunda, noise ricochets o, the concrete semicircle, which forms an acoustic mirror for As Above, so Below (2024). Here, the sounds are readily associated with birds and insects of the kind one might expect in a pastoral[…]
Maladaptation to the Screen
2023
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Dehlia Hannah, for ‘In a forest of red, green and blue’, Cécile B. Evans & Troika, Max Goelitz Gallery, Munich, 11 May–17 June 2023

‘Maladaptation to the Screen’
Dehlia Hannah

The 1818 novel Frankenstein, Or: the Modern Prometheus was adapted for the stage almost immediately after its publication. Audiences were fascinated by the tale itself and horrified by the thought that it was authored by a woman only eighteen years of age.  The young Mary Godwin began writing modernity’s paradigmatic tale of scientific hubris and the perils of emerging technology amid a love affair with a married man[…]
Caught Knapping
2022
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Mark Rappolt, ‘Caught Knapping’, in ‘Untertage’

‘Caught Knapping’
Mark Rappolt

A pile of salt.1 Or perhaps two piles of salt. Neither is quite correct. Perhaps it’s easier, for the moment, to leave the material details to one side; to focus on the concept. After all, we’re always being told that that’s what contemporary art is really all about. In any case, everyone knows that today we live in a dematerialised world. How else could we have survived the great[…]
Salting the Earth
2022
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Eva Wilson, ‘Salting the Earth’, in ‘Untertage’

‘Salting the Earth‘
Eva Wilson

Accommodating multiple shades of the colours red, green, and blue as seen by a computer; a salt fountain; chemical gardens; flint chips and silicon wafers; and the last tree on earth,Troika’s project Untertage, developed over several years, takes shape as an elaborate ecosystemic fiction. The focus of the project’s narrative shifts away from a human protagonist and towards a non-human actor who, here, is devised as the real hero of an aeonian drama of world domination. Flipping the traditional figure-ground[…]
Life Matters
2022
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Ariane Koek, ‘Life Matters’, in ‘Untertage’

‘Life Matters’
Ariane Koek

‘What happens when human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics, become unthinkable in the best sciences, whether natural or social? Seriously unthinkable: not available to think with.’   – Donna Haraway, “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene”, e- flux Journal, Issue 75 (September[…]
Salt of the World
2022
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Paul Carey-Kent, ‘Salt of the world’, Seisma Magazine, 8 April 2022

‘Salt of the world’
Paul Carey-Kent

The various projects of the London-based Franco-German trio Troika – formed in 2003 by Eva Rucki, Conny Freyer and Sebastien Noel – often focus on how the ‘real’ is giving way to the ‘digital’, and the consequences. Recently, though, they have set new work into a wider, additional, narrative that forms part of their ongoing project ‘Untertage’[…]
Borrowed Light
2018
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Kiki Mazzuchelli, ‘Borrowed Light’, artist book, publ. 2018

‘Borrowed Light’
Kiki Mazzuchelli

‘Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. […] today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the[…]
Trickle Down Aesthetics
2017
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Greg J. Smith, ‘Trickle Down Aesthetics – Cellular Automata in recent works by Troika’, 28 February 2017

‘Trickle Down Aesthetics’
Greg J. Smith

Cellular automata are one of the classic techniques of deriving algorithmic form, and for good reason – they o!er a great return on investment. Spawning complex and unpredictable 2D patterns from simple rules, they are the type of system that many programmers play[…]
Approaching Perception 
2015
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Claudia Segura ‘Approaching Perception’, interview with Troika, June 2015

‘Approaching Perception’
Claudia Segura

‘If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.’ – William Blake, The Marriage Of Heaven and Hell Perception has been one of the most questioned concepts in the history of art. In its origins, altar painting wanted to simulate religious deeds as truthfully as possible so that people could[…]