about

The title SALT. CLAY. ROCK. is inspired by the three materials—salt, clay and granite—which are currently considered the most suitable for the storage of radioactive waste. The project juxtaposes the situation in Germany and Hungary, two countries that have chosen radically different paths when it comes to nuclear energy. While Germany initiated its nuclear exit in 2023 with the shutdown of all nuclear power plants, Hungary is building a new nuclear power plant, the heavily debated PAKS II. Despite these differences, both countries are challenged by the search for final repositories for their high-level radioactive waste, which according to an EU regulation, must be located within any member nation’s borders. This is an unresolved issue globally; with the exception of the Finnish final repository of Onkalo that has a planned opening in 2025, no other country has built a long-term storage for their high-risk nuclear energy by-products.

Through locally embedded research and new artistic productions, SALT.CLAY.ROCK focuses on rural places in Germany and Hungary that host nuclear infrastructures such as uranium mines, power plants and waste repositories, or have been and still are important sites of anti-nuclear resistance. It investigates how nuclear industries and infrastructures affect our lives, delving into the production of nuclear energy and the storage of radioactive waste, and how it impacts the day-to-day reality of the local communities that coexist with these infrastructures, its consequences, as well as its looming yet invisible dangers.

CURATORIAL AND ARTISTIC FIELDWORK
We decided to focus on the situation in Germany and Hungary due to the respective backgrounds of the curatorial team, which has enabled us to do in-depth research focusing on more than the above mentioned differences in their nuclear policies and the Central European geopolitical context. Over a tow-year period (2023-2024) together with the commissioned artists, we have visited impacted local communities to learn more about their perspectives and experience. We traveled to remote villages, visited small mining museums, joined guided tours in functioning and defunct power plants, walked down mine shafts to explore the underground world of repositories, talked about folk dance, punk and self-organized cultural work as driving forces of anti-nuclear resistance, and sat at dinner tables with pro-nuclear families who shared with us the long history of Carnival parties organized by repository workers—all the while amazed and deeply impressed by the complexity, multiperspectivity and conflictual nature of the issues we are addressing.

RESEARCH ASSEMBLY
On November 17-19, 2023, we held a three-day research assembly in nGbK Berlin, where the curatorial team and invited artists shared findings with each other and the public, in the form of a research display and a versatile program of conversations, presentations and performances. Researchers, activists, artists and thinkers were invited to join the assembly, and share their knowledge and insights on complex, often ambivalent and even polarizing issues such as the politics of nuclear energy and radioactive waste, anti-nuclear movements, memory culture, and questions around energy futures.

For more information on the assembly’s program, please visit a post about it in our news & event section.

ARTIST-LED FIELD TRIPS
To allow our audiences direct encounters with the rural locations that we worked in, two artists were commissioned to lead field trips to sites with nuclear stories to tell: Boda in Hungary and Rheinsberg in Germany.

Working in the small village of Boda, a possible site for Hungary’s final repository for high-level radioactive waste, Csilla Nagy and Rita Süveges invited the SALT. CLAY. ROCK. audience on a field trip to consider the deep time of radioactive waste in a participatory-performance gathering and communal pit-firing session on site in July 2024. Using the oldest technique of transforming clay into ceramics, the artists created shapes and objects inspired by ‘nuclear semiotics’, the interdisciplinary research field investigating how we communicate with future human (and non-human) generations about the location and dangers of nuclear waste repository. The program was accompanied by interventions from several invited guests—a former uranium miner from the region; the village’s mayor who is a key figure in the decision-making about the future repository; an environmental activist and organizer from Pécs who strives to raise critical awareness about the repository in the local community; and a geologist who is working for the research institute investigating the long-term safety of the repository envisioned in Boda. 

Marike Schreiber investigated the entanglements of the former GDR's first nuclear power plant in Rheinsberg— also the first in Germany to be entirely decommissioned—and the Stechlin nature preserve that surrounds it. She conceived an artist-led field trip to Rheinsberg in early September 2024 that included a hike and swim in Lake Stechlin, famously described in a novel by German realist poet Theodor Fontane, that has also played an important role in cooling the power plant. The lake's excellent water quality and biodiversity have been studied by researchers since the late 19th century. Along the way, the audience met discussants from AG Rheinsberger Bahnhof, researchers from the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, and Reinhard Dalchow (initiator of “Environmental Sundays”, and a retired pastor of nearby Menz parish) and Jörg Möller (former KKR employee and chairman of the Rheinsberg Town History Association). 

For more information on these events please visit our news & event section.

EXHIBITION
The exhibition presents nine new artistic commissions resulting from our situated and locally embedded research. Each artist has engaged with a particular site, focusing on specific aspects of nuclear pasts and futures, in order to articulate these through their distinct  practice and approach. Many of the works were created in dialogue with local communities, foregrounding their subjective visions and grassroots perspectives. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a public program that includes exhibition guided tours by the participating artists and curators, as well as contributions of invited guests in the form of performances, discussions and film screenings, which will offer additional perspectives on the  exhibition’s key questions.

For more information on the public program please visit our news & events section.

Katalin Erdödi (Budapest/Vienna) works as a curator, dramaturg and researcher, with a focus on socially engaged art, experimental performance and interventions in public space. Her cross-disciplinary practice ranges from curating festivals and exhibitions to collaborating with artists on site-specific, participatory projects that explore the potential of art as social practice. In 2020 she received the Igor Zabel Award Grant for her locally embedded and inclusive curatorial work. She has been a curator at steirischer herbst (Graz), Impulse Theater Festival (NRW), brut/imagetanz festival (Vienna), GfZK (Leipzig), PLACCC Festival and Trafó House of Contemporary Arts (Budapest). As part of her PhD in Curating (ZHdK Zurich/University of Reading UK) she is currently researching socio-political transformation in post-socialist rural places, with a focus on Hungary (title: Working Towards a Rural Agonistics - Curating Critical Rural Art Practices as Counterpublics). Reference projects: Rural Productive Forces - A collaborative village play with Antje Schiffers/Myvillages (trans-local collaborations in Belarus, Germany, Hungary and Spain, 2021-2023); News Medley with Alicja Rogalska and the Women’s Choir of Kartal (OFF Biennale Budapest, 2020-2021); I like being a farmer and I would like to stay one with Antje Schiffers/Myvillages (Ludwig Museum Budapest, 2017-2018).

Marc Herbst (Bozen/Leipzig) is an artist, writer and  co-editor of The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest (Joaap). He is a research associate at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano’s art department, his PhD from Goldsmiths focused on how cultural forms help co-organize relations in the light of radical climate change. His often collaborative practice incorporates publications, performance, critical praxis, illustration  and cultural organizing. Recent publishing pre: co-editor/co-publisher with Pluto Press and Max Haiven, We are Nature Defending Itself by Jay Jordan and Isa Fremeaux, 2021: Co-editor (with Michelle Teran) Everything Gardens! Growing in the Ruins of Modernity as the Princessinengarten’s contribution to the nGbK Licht, Luft, Scheisse project which was released by NGBK/ADOKS in 2019. He is an unofficial advisor to the Snake River Alliance, a historic anti-nuclear organization and activist group in Idaho (USA), and as a research fellow there looked into changing theologies of the area’s indigenous, Mormon and also mainstream Christian communities. 
https://marcherbst.wordpress.com/

Julia Kurz (Leipzig) is a curator, art educator and writer, who experiments with formats and methods of (un)learning and knowledge exchange. She has hosted and developed exhibitions, public programs, workshops in and outside of the institution, in urban as well as rural contexts, working mostly transdiciplinary, and in collectives. Collaborations include the collective and project space dieschönestadt in Halle (Saale) (2008 - 2012), Public Art Worker (2009 - 2013), and Kompliz* (since 2018), a network that supports exchange between urban and rural NGOs, cultural organizations and artists across Saxony. Between 2006-2016 she worked as a curator, producer and educator for the Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig (GfZK) on various research and exhibition projects, a.o. Up Till Now - Reconsidering Performance and Actionist Art from the GDR (2013), Responsive Subjects – Designing Collective Actions (2013-2014), and Travesty for Advanced Performers (2015-2016). Since 2023 she is developing a Curating the City - program (Stadtkurator*innen-Programm) for the City of Leipzig. Further institutions she worked for and collaborated with are, among others, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst Berlin, BURG Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle, and Dresden State Art Collections. Between 2016 and 2023 she taught as a research associate at the Cultures of the Curatorial program (HGB Leipzig), where she still is a PhD candidate.

Virág Major-Kremer (Berlin) is a curator and art manager, with an academic background in international relations, art management and curating.She is currently working as Producer and Researcher in Science, Media and Digital Practices  at HKW Berlin. She has worked internationally in the field of visual arts, from contemporary galleries in Budapest, through project management for the Contemporary Architecture Center in Budapest and curatorial assistance at dOCUMENTA(13), to the Cultural Manager position at the Vasarely Museum Budapest.  In her curatorial practice she often focuses on education, developing empowering and informal formats for learning combining practical and discursive concerns.   She was artistic director of The School of Free Printing (2015-2020), an informal artistic-civic educational project in Hungary based on methods of reform pedagogist Célestin Freinet, and the two-year project DemoLab (2018-2020). Especially passionate about artistic engagement with gardens and landscapes and the non-human, she edited the publication Reap and Sow (2015) and is co-author of the traveling exhibition and book TRANSYLVANIA RETOUCHED (2020). More: https://virag.cargo.site/

Vincent Schier (Berlin) works as a curator. He was artistic director at the Kunstverein Göttingen and worked at  the Kunsthaus Dresden, the GfZK in Leipzig and the nGbK in Berlin. He has realized projects for the neuer berliner kunstverein, the Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien, the Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Schwules Museum Berlin and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, among others, and has taught at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig and the Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule in Halle. In his exhibition practice, his main focus is on social and ecological issues and process-based and collaborative working methods. He is interested in rethinking institutional structures and questions of sustainability, also in the field of art.

DINA DARABOS (Budapest) works as a project manager, financial manager, and event organiser. She collaborates with organisations and projects in the fields of cultural, civic, and social issues and has been freelancing since 2019.

She began her career in contemporary art at MODEM in Debrecen, where she served as an exhibition and programme coordinator for seven years. She then worked as an exhibition manager at the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest. Currently, she is the financial manager of the PAD Foundation, production manager of OFF-Biennale Budapest, and venue manager of the Think for Tomorrow space (formerly Tent without Borders) at the Sziget Festival. She has been working with UNICEF Hungary for several years on the implementation of Hungarian child protection projects and was the event manager for the 2023 Conference on the Rights of the Child.

She has also contributed to the Memory of Rape in Wartimes: Women as Victims of Sexual Violence (Budapest Capital - Budapest History Museum), the exhibition On Violence (Budapest Gallery), and the Sidewalk Biennale (Budapest Gallery). Additionally, she is an enthusiastic volunteer for the School of Public Life.

KAROLINE KERKAI (Berlin), born in Dunaújváros, Hungary, studied Cultural Studies and Sociology with a focus on Eastern Europe at Freie Universität Berlin. She lives in Berlin and Budapest, where she has been active since 2012 as a coordinator for international cultural projects and as a translator. She has worked for various cultural institutions as an event organizer and consultant, including the Goethe-Institut Budapest and Collegium Hungaricum Berlin. In these roles, she contributed to numerous German-Hungarian projects, interdisciplinary program formats, and independent scene festivals, such as translationale berlin, rules festival, windwall, and electrical jungle.