artists

• Ana Alenso

  

  Pech and Blende

  2 hammer drills,  drill supports, hoses and drill steel, cartridge casings, 0.50 BMG bullets, 3 photographs (framed, 60 x 80 cm), data sheets of hammer drill, 2024

  In her artistic work, Ana Alenso deals with the global dependence on resources and the ecological, political, social and economic exploitation that goes hand in hand with it. Mines, mining and related questions have been a longstanding focus for the artist. As part of SALT. CLAY. ROCK., she expanded her research to uranium mining and the contemporary post-mining landscape of the Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains) in Germany, concentrating on Johanngeorgenstadt and Schlema, two towns with a key role in the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) history of uranium mining. The effects and consequences of this important industry for the GDR are still being discussed and dealt with today and will probably not be conclusively clarified in the future. To this day, the social, health, and above all the ecological effects of uranium mining shape coexistence in the region. Since the end of mining, Wismut GmbH - the successor company of the Soviet-German Corporation of the same name (Wismut SDAG) - has been remediating the uranium mining legacies, with an unforeseeable end.
  
  In her installation, Ana Alenso sets up two hammer drills, to confront each other like military enemies. These drills were once used to mine uranium ore underground in Aue and Bad Schlema within the Erzgebirge. The equipment, borrowed from Wismut GmbH, was carefully cleaned and assessed for residual radioactivity. Nevertheless, radioactive contamination still lingering inside the equipment, though harmless to visitors of the exhibition, cannot be ruled out. The hammer drills not only symbolize the effects of underground work on the human body—in addition to the radioactive radiation of uranium, miners were exposed to pollutants, radon exposure, emissions from the rock and dust—they also stand as a sign for the violence anchored in human action towards nature, as well as the violence that uranium may unleash with its radioactive potential.
  
  Because of the massive uranium deposits in the Erzgebirge, Wismut SDAG quickly became the largest producer of uranium for the Soviet nuclear program and played a key role in the Cold War nuclear arms race. Furthermore, the Wismut was organized like a military enterprise or a "state within a state" and enabled the USSR to become a nuclear superpower. Regrettably, the role of uranium in global conflicts is not a thing of the past. In addition to attacks on nuclear infrastructure, weapons with uranium ammunition are reportedly used by both warring parties in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The use of these weapons can have far-reaching and long-term consequences for the civilian population and makes it difficult to rebuild affected areas because the effects of uranium are so difficult to remediate.
  
  The hoses of the hammer drills, which are part of their compressed air and cooling systems, are arranged in the shape of an infinity sign and form a closed circuit. This illustrates the temporal dimension of uranium, which shapes the past and at the same time shows a future that cannot be overlooked and lies beyond human imagination. The cycle also highlights how underground mines are globally interconnected due to their social and environmental impacts. Not only are they often linked in the global supply chain system, but they are also emblematic of the insatiable urge to expand and the impulse to exuberantly extract, which takes place all over the world.

  Special thanks to Augusto Gerardi Rousset, Susann Krächan (Wismut GmbH), Simone Müller (Wismut GmbH), Lukas Oertel und Matthew Jonathan Raven.

  

  

  ANA ALENSO

  Ana Alenso's artistic practice addresses the historical, social and environmental impacts of extractivism, global resource politics, and the trade of precious metals and fossil fuels. Her installations are often temporary and closed-circuit assemblages, consisting of sculptures, photographs, sound, and video. Her poetic, industrial, yet darkly dystopian work is usually preceded by extensive research and field studies. She participated in artistic residencies at Goethe Institut Chile, Villa Sträuli in Switzerland and Urbane Künste Ruhr in Dortmund. Recent exhibitions include: Geneva Biennale: “Sculpture Garden” in Switzerland, “Street fight at Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland; “Oil - Beauty and Horror in the Petrol Age” at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; “The Garden Bridge” at Brücke Museum, “El Museo de la democracia” in NGBK and “Terrestrial Assemblage” at Floating University in Berlin. She holds an MFA in Art in Context from the Berlin University of Arts (2015), an MFA in Media Art & Design from Bauhaus University Weimar (2012) and an BA from Armando Reverón Arts University in Venezuela (2004).

  https://anaalenso.com/

  

• András Cséfalvay

  

  Prometheus Unbound, Total sacrifice. For Three Voices, Sung Sadly But With Vigor

  Video opera, 20 min, 2024

  Inspired by Prometheus Unbound, a lyrical drama written by the English Romantic poet Percy Shelley and published in 1820, András Cséfalvay crafts a three-act animated video opera that reflects on the human quest for unlimited energy and the price we are willing to pay for it. His starting point is the story of Prometheus, one of the titans in Greek mythology, who stole fire from Olympus to give to humanity in the form of knowledge, technology and "civilization", for which he was punished by the gods. András combines ancient mythology with science fiction aesthetics to ask: How ready are we to trust the power of knowledge and put our faith in progress? How does our desire to dominate nature inform our thinking about nuclear energy?

  The video work unfolds these questions with the help of three mythological figures—Prometheus, Asia and Cosmia—who all represent different positions. Drawing on his in situ research at the Bátaapáti repository for low- and medium-level radioactive waste in Hungary, András Cséfalvay transforms the repository’s underground tunnels and its system of concrete containers used to package waste into the backdrop of a conversation sung between his protagonists. They discuss the ultimate utopia of moving from nuclear fission to fusion, in order to release the endless energy we so desire to in order to satisfy the needs of our unsustainable ways of life. The figure of Prometheus calls for his release from captivity and in exchange, promises to equip humanity with this knowledge. But is this the path we want to take, and if yes, what does it really entail?

  “The utmost goal of culture is domination,” the nymphs sing. “How can I change something without force? That is the ecological question!” At the heart of András’s work lies the current societal debate about energy futures, the desired green transition and the climate emergency we are now experiencing on a planetary level. Is a technological fix possible, or even desirable? Is there any room for techno-optimism? The artist prompts us to think about the relationship between humanity and nature, and the dilemma that more knowledge often leads to more domination: “I want to know you, so you don’t have power over me. But I don’t want to know you so much that I could overpower you.” His mythological creatures stress the more-than-human implications of our actions.

  In this new work, András brings together his longstanding interest in the entanglements of science, knowledge and power with his cross-genre practice of combining conceptual visual arts and experimental music to attempt a project of dystopian, yet hopeful world-building through mytho-poetic and speculative storytelling. Insisting on the usefulness and reality of fiction, he invites us to explore far-reaching philosophical questions and delve into the relationship between culture and technology, using humor to hone his critical reflections. Bátaapáti and its repository are not only present in the video opera through its animated scenography; András also includes a subtle collaborative element. He recorded the voices of children from the village’s elementary school chanting the refrain of the opera in Hungarian and transformed it into the murmur of the sea that visitors to the exhibition may perceive as a sort of fantasy language.

  

  ANDRÁS CSÉFALVAY (1986) is a visual artist, digital storyteller, mytho-poet from Bratislava, currently teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. After his studies of painting and mathematics, he wrote a dissertation on the usefulness and reality of fiction. He delves into the relationship between culture and technology, the political and ethical aspects of listening to non-dominant voices in world-interpretation. His latest works look at the relationship between astronomers and indigenous peoples in the construction of the Mauna Kea telescopes, the flight of dinosaurs as a technology for survival after the extinction and the re-categorization of the planet Pluto. He is a recipient of the Oskar Čepan Award for young visual artists, member of The New Centre for Research and Practice, is a co-founder of the Digital Arts Platform at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava.  He exhibited in KunstWerke Berlin, Art In General New York, Trafo Gallery Budapest,  Firstdraft Sydney, Karlin Studios Prague among other institutions.

  http://www.andrascsefalvay.com/

  

• Krisztina Erdei with Dániel Misota

  

  Taking Time
  3-channel video, 2024
  
  Krisztina Erdei and Dániel Misota’s work is the culmination of a long-term engagement with the community of Bátaapáti, a small village in Hungary’s Tolna County, whose outskirts have hosted a low- and medium-level radioactive waste final repository since 2011. Their project explores the complex social, economic, and cultural implications of living in proximity to this nuclear waste storage, blending community-based participation, artistic intervention, and personal storytelling. The artists' primary focus is on the villagers’ intimate, non-official narratives of their lives in the shadow of this looming nuclear facility. For over a year, Erdei and Misota frequently returned to Bátaapáti, building relationships with residents of all ages and backgrounds, collecting their personal stories that evoke different ways of living, working, and loving throughout the village’s turbulent history over the past two centuries. Through telling these stories, they juxtapose politically and economically significant "grand narratives" with personal memories, examining how the presence of the repository reshapes the community's collective memory, its space, and day-to-day experiences.

  The central film of the 3-channel video installation portrays Bátaapáti through a series of short scenes with filmic re-enactments of the collected stories, co-created and performed by local community members. By reshuffling locations and protagonists, the artists engage the residents in a dynamic reflection on their shared history, contemplating the vast timescales framed by the radioactive waste stored nearby. This condensed account of the village's history is framed by the other two videos’ slow-moving, almost static scenes. In one of them, the camera explores the organic texture of the repository’s underground tunnel walls, contrasting them with the carefully crafted crates of radioactive waste. The other video lingers on the lonely church tower of Üveghuta in a forest near Bátaapáti, which is the sole remnant of a once thriving German-minority village there whose buildings have otherwise been entirely reclaimed by nature. The tower serves as a testament to historical changes that occur in time; the rapid economic decline following the collapse of the region’s viticulture, as well as the rural-to-urban out-migration that occurred in the early 20th century that was further compounded by the forced displacement of the village’s German population after World War II. The juxtaposition of these two environments—the radioactive waste repository and the abandoned settlement—invites us to consider how very human yet volatile personal concerns and desires are suspended between grand narratives of history and catapulted into the unfathomable more-than-human scale of deep time.

  The work reflects on the interwoven layers of past, present, and future, and the broader tensions between human and non-human forces in the Anthropocene. It challenges the dominance of official, scientific documentation and historical narratives by prioritizing lived experience over archival material, creating a dialogue between the local cultural context and global issues such as ecology, radioactive decay, and human impact on the environment. Inspired by the rich social and cultural fabric of the region, the project raises critical questions about the relationship between material evidence, isolation, and memory. It serves as a powerful commentary on how anthropogenic markers, like the "nuclear cemetery" of the repository, extend the village’s temporal horizon into the unimaginable future, confronting us with the transience of human life against the backdrop of an enduring, radioactive legacy.

  Special thanks: Réka Kuris, Attiláné Kuris, Jázmin Kuris, Dávid Durgonics, Balázs Zele, Kata Kocsor, Zsófia Margetin, Levente Farkas, Tamás Farkas , Artúr Forrai, Martin Braun, Mirtill Forrai, Attila Schafer, János Nagy, Mónika Illésné Nagy, Csaba Illés, János Horváth, Jánosné Horváth, Sándor Torac, József  Utasi, József  Sári, Józsefné Sári, Sándorné Oláh, Elizabet Víg, Izabell Víg, Anett Vígné Csereklei, Gábor Máté, Dorottya Tóth, Zsoltné Tóth, Gábor Tornóczky, Gáborné Tornóczky, András Zele, Andrásné Zele, Zoltán Ferenczi, Zoltán Kern, students from the primary school.

  KRISZTINA ERDEI
  Kristina Erdei is a visual artist born in Szeged, Hungary, currently living in Budapest. She graduated from the University of Szeged with a degree in Philosophy, and received her PhD in Multimedia Art from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design with a dissertation entitled "Fighting for your story, memory research and contemporary art in the 21st century". His broader interests include visual culture, interdisciplinary and collaborative art practices. She is typically concerned with the cohesiveness and connectivity of communities, looking for the defining characters that shape and enable collective action. Erdei is currently a student at the Eötvös Loránd University Doctoral School of Philosophy, an assistant professor at the Partium Christian University and an art critic for the Magyar Narancs weekly liberal magazine with a strong satirical tone. Krisztina Erdei is a sensitive artist committed to working with communities. She is open to different mediums, but basically works in the field of photography and creates her series with a critical approach. Her aesthetics are unsought, instinctive, often her image seems to be created randomly, while in fact she builds complex connections in her works. In her multi-layered series, which actively involve the viewer in the process of drawing conclusions, her strong yet sympathetic opinion evokes the basic values of humanistic photography, reimagined in a 21st-century's context. http://krisztinaerdei.com/

  
  DÁNIEL MISOTA (1992) is a filmmaker and media artist from Budapest whose work is concerned with the critical potential of film style. Upon graduating from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in 2022 he worked as cinematographer on various art, film and television projects across Europe resulting in notable collaborations with Joseph Tasnadi on his film ‘La Primavera’ and Talya Feldman on her multi-channel film installation ‘Psithurism’. His thesis film ‘Mária Kerényi, 41, July 1970’ — a reenactment of a propaganda film from the 1970s — has been presented in the exhibition ‘Re:Re: Artistic re-enactments, the art of re-enactment’ at MODEM Centre for Modern and Contemporary Art. He is currently working on his PhD on emancipatory cinematic forms.
  https://www.instagram.com/daniel_probablement/

  

• Csilla Nagy & Rita Süveges

  Overcoming Time

  Installation with one-channel video, ceramic objects, 2024
  
  Csilla Nagy and Rita Süveges were invited to work on a special, site-specific format for SALT. CLAY. ROCK. to create an artist-led field trip to one of our Hungarian research sites. The artists chose the small village of Boda, where exploratory drilling, by the Public Limited Company for Radioactive Waste Management (PURAM), is ongoing to determine whether the claystone formation below the village is a suitable final repository for the country's high-level radioactive waste. Csilla and Rita juxtapose the invisibility of these nuclear infrastructures—with test drilling sites marked only by inconspicuous blue containers on the outskirts of the village—and the deep time of nuclear half-life—the hidden, yet enduring presence of radioactive waste for millions of years to come.

  A performative-participatory gathering took place at the “info park” of PURAM in Boda. It culminated in a communal pit-firing session on one of the hottest days of the summer in mid-July 2024. Using this ancient technique of transforming clay into ceramics, the artists created hexagonal shapes inspired by the power plant fuel rods. They were inspired as well as by“nuclear semiotics”, an interdisciplinary field of research, which tries to imagine how we can communicate about radioactive waste repositories’ toxicity and locations to future generations of humans and non-humans. How do we warn them? What symbols and language do we use? Could burnt clay be an effective means of communication? After all, ceramic objects are often the only remaining traces of ancient civilizations, from which archaeologists interpret how people once lived.

  Csilla Nagy and Rita Süveges use pit-firing as a metaphor to visualize the otherwise invisible infrastructure of nuclear waste storage, and grapple with “deep time” through a collective experience and witnessing of this material’s transformation. One of the biggest challenges of high-level radioactive waste containment is that it is heat-generating, which is why it needs to be stored in deep geological repositories, where its heat and radioactivity can be contained. For their installation within the exhibition the artists arrange the hexagonal shapes, pit-fired in Boda, in a long line, referencing nuclear fuel rods—the main source of high-level radioactive waste—as well as the drilling cores used in the geological investigation of potential repository sites. The fragile materiality of burnt clay associatively evokes the risks and dangers of nuclear waste storage.

  Csilla and Rita also reflect on how a small village negotiates the responsibility of taking decisions that will impact generations to come. By intervening at the PURAM info park at the outskirts of Boda, they reclaim a space occupied by the official discourse of the radioactive waste management company with more critical perspectives. As part of their artist-led field trip, they organized an open-air roundtable including the mayor of Boda, a former uranium miner, a hydrogeologist working for PURAM, and an environmental activist from the nearby regional capital of Pécs. The lively and at times heated conversation, attended by mayors from the neighboring villages as well as geologists, engineers and other stakeholders in radioactive waste management, sketched out fascinating connections between regional uranium mining, geological investigations beginning during socialism and conditioned by political transitions and neoliberal change, and the perspectives of local mayors who strive to ensure futures for their villages through exploratory drilling compensation funds. Boda and the surrounding region was revealed as a “sacrifice zone” of local mining, with the human costs of extractivism yet to be accounted for; there is little information on how miners’ health has been impacted, other than through personal stories of illness, disability and premature death. This was shared during the roundtable, making tangible the need to more transparently inform and communicate the potential risks of hosting a final repository.

  Mining history is also a history of solidarity—this is captured in the video created by the artists. The video poetically documents spontaneous moments of their in situ intervention including a moment  when miners and geologists start singing a miners’ song in a moving display of cross-disciplinary solidarity dedicated to the work below ground.

  CSILLA NAGY
  Csilla Nagy is a visual artist based in Galanta, Slovakia. Her practice is characterised by a search for ways and means of remembering. She often thematises the different layers and fragmented nature of memory, whether individual, family or collective. In recent years she has become interested in ceramics, integrating it into her artistic practice. She uses clay in conceptual and experimental ways, trying out ancient techniques or new methods, digging deep in the history of ceramics and exploring the latest technological approaches. She was awarded the Derkovits Grant, Visegrad Scholarship and Art scholarship of the Hungarian Academy in Rome. Since 2018 she is an Assistant Professor at J. Selye University, Komárno, Slovakia. https://www.csilla.xyz/
  
  RITA SÜVEGES
  Rita Süveges is a visual artist based in Budapest. Her practice is research-based, she works with communities through knowledge-sharing performative events, and for a white cube context she uses a wide range of installative media. Suveges's main topics are rooted in the ecological and climate crisis, her aims to repoliticize these issues into a societal understanding through the imaginative power of art. She is enrolled in the Doctor of Liberal Arts program of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. In her upcoming dissertation, she is questioning geoengineering and techno-optimism from a feminist perspective.

  She was awarded the TÓTalJOY Award, Smohay Award, Derkovits Grant, New National Excellence Grant, Visegrad Scholarship, and was nominated for the Strabag and the Esterhazy Art Award.

  She took part in residency programs in Cité des Arts de Paris, ISCP New York, Meetfactory Prague, MQ/Q21 AIR Vienna, Balatorium, Künstlerdorf Schöppingen etc. Having several solo and group shows in Hungary, in the international context she exhibited in Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, Off–Biennale Budapest and Collegium Hungaricum Berlin among others.

  She is also a co-founder of xtro realm artist group, which since 2017 organizes reading circles, exhibitions, field trips dealing with the ecological theories that critique the anthropocentrism of contemporary thinking. She was an editor, author and designer of extrodæsia – Encyclopedia Towards a Post-Anthropocentric World, and the Climate Imaginary Reader. Süveges was a curator of ACLIM! part of OFF–Biennale Budapest 2021. She was also a board member of the Association of Studio of Young Artists between 2018–2021.
  http://www.ritasuveges.com/
  

  

• Sonya Schönberger

  God With Us (250 Million <-> 1 Million)

  Multimedia Installation, 2024

  In her multimedia installation, Sonya Schönberger explores connections between local mining history and radioactive waste storage within the former salt mine of Morsleben, Saxony-Anhalt, which served as the GDR’s final repository for low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste and that now remains as a final waste repository. The installation focuses on the unique salt there, and the history of the “Bartensleben” shaft in Morsleben and the “Marie” shaft in Beendorf that is connected to it. Both communities play an important role in Schönberger’s artistic examination. Both towns were located in the highly controlled border area, where employees of the radioactive waste repository needed permits to work unless they lived there. Beendorf is home to a small, volunteer-run museum that focuses on the history of forced labor in the “Marie” shaft during the Nazi era. Schönberger juxtaposes this recent history with the vast timescales encapsulated by the salt rock’s deep-time history  and the future that the stored nuclear waste will inhabit.

  Potash and rock salt mining in the Oberen Allertal region originated in Beendorf, where entrepreneur Gerhard Korte commissioned the region’s first mine shaft. His mining company was named “God With Us.” The shaft, named after Korte's wife, was inaugurated as “Marie” in 1897. Until 1969, potash and rock salt were extracted from the underground-linked mines Marie and Bartensleben, the latter of which began operations shortly after Marie; both now form the whole of the Morsleben repository.

  The landscape of Beendorf is dominated by a massive salt pile excavated from below the ground. Schönberger connects this overground remnant of salt mining with the immense cosmos lying just beneath, underground. A camera journey reveals the vast dimensions of the interconnected shafts, showing the network of tunnels and chambers carved into the salt where, starting in 1944, forced laborers from across Europe were made to work for the Nazi arms industry. Schönberger includes quotations from these laborers, drawn from Björn Kooger's extensive 2004 publication, Rüstung unter Tage (Arms Race Underground), which documents the injustices and crimes that occurred underground. The presence of these testimonies actively resists the burial of this history as the repository itself is sealed and closed for good.

  Salt rocks from the mine, which Schönberger transported into the exhibition space, acts almost like quotations in stone. They are relics of 250 million years of history; Morsleben and Beendorf’s salt rock are anchor points for geological time, hinting at vast time scales involved in both the past and the future of these places. This salt formation, currently used to store low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste, was formed during the geological epoch known as the Zechstein and was moved to its current location through tectonic shift and pressure from deeper geological layers. This quality of having survived movement underlines why salt is qualified as a material for the permanent storage of radioactive waste: it is non-brittle, ductile (malleable), yet it is hard. Thus, it meets many of the criteria sought for in the search for a suitable final repository. The Federal Company for Radioactive Waste Disposal (Bundesgesellschaft für Endalgerung, BGE), which runs an information center in Morsleben about their underground research has a main task to identify suitable areas within the salt mine for potential final storage that will last the next million years.

  Special thanks for support to Anna Byskov, Swantje Claußen (BGE), Hildegard and Klaus Ebel, Christian Guinchard and Laetitia Ogorzelec (LaSA, Laboratory of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Franche-Comté), Claus Hansper, Claire Kueny (ISBA Besançon), Péter László Horváth (BGE), Annette and Torsten Kniep, Flo Maak, Sven Petersen (BGE), Karla and Hartmut Schulze, and Christof Zwiener.

  SONYA SCHÖNBERGER
  Sonya Schönberger is a Berlin-based artist whose practice deals with biographical ruptures against the backdrop of political or social upheaval. The source of her artistic exploration are the people themselves, who tell about their stories in biographical conversations. This is how some archives were created, but also already existing, partly found archives flow into her work. Five years ago, she created the "Berliner Zimmer," a long-term video archive based on the stories of people in Berlin.

  www.sonyaschoenberger.de
  www.berliner-zimmer.net

  

• Marike Schreiber

  

  

  Radiant Lake

  Multimedia installation with bar sculpture, medal and jewelry box, wallpaper, audio; "="$

  In September 2024, Marike Schreiber realized an artist-led field trip as part of SALT. CLAY. ROCK. with the former Rheinsberg nuclear power plant in northern Brandenburg and the surrounding Stechlin nature reserve as her destinations. Interested in this unique entanglement of nuclear energy production and nature preservation, her artistic research focused on the Great Stechlin Lake, which had played a crucial role as the natural "cooling system" of the power plant, and is widely known for its remarkable water quality and rich biodiversity as a freshwater lake. In 1959, the Department of Experimental Limnology (the study of inland waters), a branch of the Central Institute for Microbiology and Experimental Therapy (ZIMET) in Jena, was established here, with the primary aim of studying the effects of the nuclear power plant on the lake. This resulted in one of the most comprehensive long-term data series of limnology globally. After the German reunification, in 1992, a new research institute with an experimental station on Stechlin Lake was created. It received its present name "Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries" in 2000, following its inclusion in the Leibniz Association. Today scientists working here predominantly focus on the impact of climate change on the lake's ecosystem, drawing on the long-term data collected during the operation of the nuclear power plant.

  In the frame of SALT. CLAY. ROCK., the Rheinsberg nuclear power plant (NPP) and its history are central to examining the legacy of nuclear infrastructures. In 1966, this was the first nuclear power plant to go into operation in East Germany (GDR), and since 1995, it is the first one to be decommissioned and turned into a “green field”.

  Both Marike Schreiber's artist-led field trip and her work for the exhibition explore this history, highlighting its contradictions and controversies. An important point of departure is the nuclear power plant's main gate, which until today features a peace dove, an omnipresent political symbol of the GDR that referenced the "peaceful atom", the allegedly peaceful use of nuclear energy in the midst of the Cold War. When the Rheinsberg NPP was opened, all the workers participating in its construction received one of two thousand specially minted medals. The front side showed the peace dove within a drawing of the atom, while the back side read: "In recognition of your contribution to the first nuclear power plant of the GDR, Rheinsberg, 9.5.166." 

  Marike Schreiber’s work also addresses the legacy of the Environmental Sundays (Umweltsonntage), a series of events initiated by Reinhard Dalchow, a pastor at the Protestant church in the nearby Menz during the 1980s. The goal of these Sunday gatherings was to spark an open discussion about the environmental impact and the consequences of energy production in the GDR. The first event was dedicated to water and water pollution, as these were not publicly discussed topics at the time. With a "water reception" held at the church—an institution that often served as a safe space for resistance movements in the GDR—the organizers strived to call attention to the importance of clean drinking water.

  All these elements are combined and translated into sculptural form in Marike Schreiber's work, reflecting her ongoing interest in the visualization of scientific data via images, models, and more metaphorical concepts. She redesigned the workers' medal and created a bar sculpture for the water reception, which were both first activated during the artist-led field trip and now form part of her installation. Instead of taking flight, the iconic peace dove sits still and looks us straight in the eye, in an uneasy reference to current wars and their (mis)use of nuclear infrastructures as well as the system change heralded by the shutdown of the Rheinsberg power plant in the late 1990s. The bar sculpture is a multi-layered construction—meant to represent the deep layers of the lake—while its octagonal shape and the way the drinking glasses are arranged on the bar references the 24 lake-water basins of the LakeLab on Stechlin Lake. The hanging containers filled with lake water point to the discrepancy between the lake's reputation for clean water and the fact that it has been polluted for years. During guided tours of the exhibition, visitors will be invited to use the bar and participate in the water reception.

  The exhibition will end with an Environmental Sunday [Umweltsonntag] as the closing event, with Marike Schreiber, retired Pastor Reinhard Dalchow, and paleontologist Björn Kröger as guests.

  Special thanks to AG Rheinsberger Bahnhof, the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Reinhard Dalchow (initiator of “Environmental Sundays”), Jörg Möller (City History Association of Rheinsberg), and Grit Ruhland (sound recording).

  

  

  MARIKE SCHREIBER (*1982 in Neustrelitz) lives and works in the Mecklenburg Lake District. She studied media art at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig. From 2008 to 2019 she ran the Leipzig art space Praline, together with Air Merten and later Yvonne Anders, which was a place for participation-oriented formats and site-specific exhibitions.

  Marike is interested in the nature of scientific images, in the visual expressions of science: how the shapes and colors of data, models and metaphorical terms are translated into images. She is interested in how they can be seen as ciphers of a certain worldview – of ideas around being human and/or of nature itself. She uses these two-dimensional images as material for sculptures and installations.

  www.marikeschreiber.de

  

• Katarina Sevic

  

  Something Man-made Is Here

  Sound installation with one-channel audio and graphic score, 2024

  Katarina Šević’s participation in SALT. CLAY. ROCK. is two-fold: she is the author of the project’s visual identity and has created a new work for the exhibition that draws on her research for the graphic design. Unlike other commissioned artists whose works are connected to a specific site and are thus locally embedded, Katarina’s focus is more overarching, but with a particular interest in the interdisciplinary research field of “nuclear semiotics” and the diverse visual languages connected to nuclear culture, spanning pro-nuclear advocacy, radiation warning messages, and anti-nuclear resistance. Nuclear semiotics is a particularly challenging, speculative and conceptual field as it strives to transcend the time and cultural limits of language, communication and meaning, and to confront the (im)possibility of warning future generations of human and non-human beings about the dangers of radioactive waste. This means that designs, signs or signals have to be invented that remain comprehensible for at least 100.000 years; it challenges us to "think-with" the deep time of the nuclear half-life and to imagine communication with creatures living in the far future.

  In this regard, Katarina is especially interested in exploring the limits of language, meaning, and cross-species communication. She combines various visual sources (symbols and texts) gathered during her research into a graphic score (verse) that is freely interpreted by a chorus of voices. Although activated by human performers, she strives to create a more-than-human soundscape, incorporating sounds made by animals when communicating with each other, as well as the technified sounds of artificial intelligence and digital media. Fusing meaning-making and world-building, Katarina's audio work and graphic score are an exercise in imagination, and are a demonstration of conceptual thought about how we pass on information and share knowledge. She is inspired by the work of nuclear semioticians such as Thomas Sebeok, a Hungarian-born American polymath, semiotician and linguist who studied human and non-human systems of communication. He proposed incorporating myth and ritual, as a "folkloric relay system" and the establishment of an "atomic priesthood," as a vehicle for social transfer across time. Other semioticians considered genetically engineered species that could function as "living radiator detectors" for transmitting messages about radiation’s hazards. The philosophers Françoise Bastide and Paolo Fabbri coined the idea of a "ray cat" and suggested that a particular animal species might be engineered that would change color in  proximity to radioactive sites.

  While the nuclear project promises almost limitless energy, it immediately comes up against the limits of our security and communication tools. Low- and medium-level radioactive waste repositories are already in operation around the world, but the means of communicating their dangers to the future are yet to be invented. Concurrently, there are still no technical means to permanently protect us from its potential hazards. These tensions and complexities are what Katarina addresses in her work, moving between the need for communicative clarity around nuclear issues—its dangers and its power—and the unfathomable questions of deep time and future life. Her sound piece becomes an uncanny "earworm" for the exhibition, resonating with the nuclear pasts and radiant futures that SALT. CLAY. ROCK. deals with.

  

  KATARINA ŠEVIĆ is an artist born in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia/Serbia. She studied at the Intermedia Department of the University of Fine Arts in Budapest and lives in Berlin.
  
  Through her artistic practice and design projects she orchestrates texts, books, artifacts, locations and archival documents in order to investigate and reframe established canons and prevalent historical narratives and their relationship to the forms of making and thinking. She works interdisciplinary, making objects, costumes and performances. She has participated in diverse collaborative projects, initiated and co-founded independent art spaces in Budapest, edited and published numerous books. https://www.katarinasevic.com/

  

• Dominika Trapp

  

  Nobody Dreams of Nuclear Power Plants
  6 Paintings, 60 x 40 cm each, 2024
  Handmade paper, watercolor crayons, pressed plants collected in the vicinity of Paks NPP

  Dominika Trapp's work delves into the intimate relationship between the workers and the Paks Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) in Hungary. Through in-depth interviews with employees spanning a wide spectrum of roles—from cleaning staff and technical school trainees to high-ranking engineers—Trapp explores their personal interpretations and embodied experiences of the reactor’s inner workings. Her research focuses on their subjective visions of the power plant and nuclear energy, in terms of the technology itself and their daily interactions with it.

  The personal conversations led by the artist reveal the NPP as an anthropomorphic technological entity, whose physical omnipresence, technological complexity, and far-reaching social and economic impact on the city and its people's lives have become normalized and naturalized throughout the years. While many employees struggle to articulate their bodily reactions and emotions in the shadow of this enigmatic and often intimidating technology, their descriptions of the power plant convey a sense of it as a living, breathing force. Their motifs and metaphors are often sentimental, transcendental, even familial. The NPP is framed in terms of belonging and identification, resembling the dynamics of a patriarchal family more than a typical workplace.

  Generational differences in perception also emerge as a key theme, reflecting broader shifts in humanity’s understanding of technology. Older engineers who joined the plant shortly after its inauguration, describe it with clinical precision, likening it to a mechanistic body, dissecting it through an anatomical lens. In contrast, younger employees have a more post-digital, science-fiction infused  perspective informed by video games such as Minecraft. These contrasting views highlight how evolving technological paradigms shape individual relationships with industrial environments.

  Trapp's intricate and intuitive paintings aim to capture these complex associations, offering a multifaceted portrait of the nuclear power plant. She paints on hand-molded paper, incorporating pressed plants collected from around the fishing pond near the nuclear facility. This location also serves as the backdrop for many of the idyllic nature photographs exhibited in the NPP's information center that they merchandise as calendars and postcards. Through this symbolic "greenwashing" and further naturalization on paper, Trapp subtly critiques the efforts to present nuclear energy as green, and points to how nuclear infrastructures use environmental preservation to improve its public image.

  Special thanks: Antal Kovács, Andrásné Kovács, Miklós Takács, Róbert Doroghi,  Dr. Katalin Gerákné Krasz, István Bartos, Zoltán Csanádi, Márk Rédl, András Farkas, Erika Schneider, Péter Nagy

  

  

  DOMINIKA TRAPP (1988, Budapest) graduated from the painting department of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2012. Her practice has been characterized by a two-way interest: on the one hand, a sensitive painterly approach that allows for intuition and introspection; on the other, an outward-directed sensitivity that facilitates dialogues between communities in the service of collective self-knowledge. More recently, she has participated in the residency programs of Art in General in New York, the Erste Stiftung in Vienna, and FUTURA in Prague. In 2020, her solo exhibition was presented at Trafó Gallery in Budapest and Karlin Studios in Prague. In 2021, she participated at the 14th Baltic Triennial in Vilnius, in 2022 at the Manifesta 14 in Prishtina, and in 2023 at EVA International – Ireland's Biennial in Limerick. She is currently a multimedia art fellow at the Doctoral School of the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design.

  https://trappdominika.hu/

  

• Anna Witt

  

  Dancing on a Volcano

  Two-channel video installation, 2024

  Anna Witt's two-part video installation is centered in the Wendland municipality of Gorleben, which became a symbol of the anti-nuclear movement and a center of critical debate around nuclear energy use in Germany. After the former salt mine near Gorleben was designated in 1977 as a nuclear waste facility site, Wendland became home to one of West Germany’s most significant and lasting grassroots protest movements of the post-war era. Witt explores how collective forms of protest have inscribed themselves into the bodies and biographies of activists and their families over generations, for which she conducted research in the Gorleben Archive.

  The title Dancing on a Volcano is a metaphor for describing risky behavior. This phrase was originally coined by French publicist Narcisse-Achille de Salvandy to criticize the French royal family’s excessive consumption on the brink of the French Revolution. This kind of behavior has parallels with today’s predominant attitudes toward the looming climate crisis and the resurgence of pro-nuclear policies, while the title of Anna Witt’s artwork also reflects on dangers and the motivations behind activism. In the Gorleben Archive in the village of Lüchow, Witt discovered materials from a similarly named music festival, Dancing on the Volcano, organized on September 4, 1982, as a protest against the planned construction of interim storage facilities in the Gorleben Forest. The police used high-pressure water cannons against the protesters for the first time there, causing serious injuries to several people. A legal case challenging the police’s actions went to the Federal Constitutional Court, but was dismissed after ten years with no legal consequences. Eyewitness accounts of the protest describe the police escalation, but also reflect on the collective learning processes that emerged from the events among the protesters and convey how groups can develop autonomous, collective strategies for action. In this form of collective protest, skills and strategies such as standing firm instead of running, managing fear, empathizing with opponents, and constantly weighing collective goals against group welfare become essential.

  In her large-format video installation, Witt works with local volunteers in the Gorleben Forest to experiment with practices of solidarity when confronted with a high-pressure water cannon. Rather than re-enacting the events of 1982, Witt’s performative experiment seeks to update the activists’ collective skills for today. Her focus here is on the physicality and embodied nature of collective action. In the video, water becomes an abstract form of violence that the group confronts through collective action. Witt is interested in the ability for collective action to be activated and the prerequisites necessary for it to be so. In the second part of the video work, this concept is projected into the future, with young adults from the Wendland reflecting on their upbringing in a culture of resistance and how their experiences have shaped their views on tackling complex challenges and fighting for climate justice.

  The video is embedded in a structure of yellow slats arranged in the shape of an “X.” The yellow “X” symbolizes the resistance against nuclear waste transports in the Wendland, uniting the rural population, the church, and anti-nuclear activists who came there to support the protests. The symbol originated in 1988, when it was used as a form of aesthetic protest along roadsides and in front yards along the route of the Castor transports from Wackersdorf to Gorleben. Today, it stands for “Day X,” the point at which the 1.5-degree climate target becomes unattainable, thus condensing symbols of different generations and causes within the environmental movement.

  Special thanks to all project participants, the Gorleben Volunteer Fire Department, Freie Bühne Wendland, Lüchow-Dannenberg Citizens’ Initiative, Meuchefitz, Gorleben Archive, Cultural Association Raum 2ev, EJZ, and HBK Braunschweig.

  

  

  ANNA WITT, born in 1981 in Germany, lives and works in Vienna and Berlin.

  Her artistic practice is performative, participatory, and political, working with performative interventions and video installations. She creates situations that reflect on social structures and the political of our everyday in the context of care, labor, class, migration and gender. The body in relation to individual and collective experiences plays a central role in her works. Passers-by in public spaces, or specific groups, - including nurses, factory workers, inhabitants of council housing or members of a youth forum, are drawn into her experimental arrangements, usually in a directly physical way. She creates situations to initiate group decision-making processes, leaving space for individual articulation and improvisation. The performative strategies range from repeated imitation of coded gestures to the development of complex choreographies, emphasizing moments of emancipatory thinking and solidarity.

  In the last years, she took part in numerous exhibitions in Austria, Germany and internationally. Her work had been shown at SEMA Seoul Museum of Art; Secession Vienna; 1st Vienna Biennale at MAK; Gallery of Contemporary Art Leipzig; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Austrian Cultural Forum New York; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg and at MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, among others and she had solo exhibitions at Museum Belvedere 21 Contemporary, Vienna; Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, and Gallery Tanja Wagner, Berlin, at Marabourparken Museum Stockholm and Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art, Prishtina, Kosovo. She took part in Aichi Triennial 19, 13; Lux/ICA Biennial of Moving Images, London; 6. Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art and Manifesta 7 in North Italy and is the winner of the Outstanding Artist Award 2020; Otto Mauer Prize 2018; Art Prize ‘Future of Europe’ in 2015; BC21 Art Award in 2013 and Art Prize Columbus Art Foundation in 2008.

  https://www.annawitt.net/