Karen Russo: Sinkholes
ACAC, Arad, Israel
May 16, 2024- August 31, 2023
At the heart of Karen Russo’s exhibition, "Sinkholes," is a new work of the same title: a short film shot in the Dead Sea area over the past two years. Russo's camera navigates between deserted beaches and architectural ruins. Though familiar, the salt flats, withering date palms, and sinkholes that make up this desert landscape seem unsettlingly dystopian.
The film's narrator, Lawrence Ronson, introduces us to his life in the salt dunes along the coast, ten years after the environmental apocalypse that led to the death of most of the world’s population. Most survivors, described as “parched animals," have left for the coast where they purify seawater, but the huge amounts of salt emitted by the desalination machines are turning the coastal landscape into a white desert of salt dunes. Water is the new currency and people fight over what little there is. The dumping of industrial waste creates a layer over the entire ocean, which obstructs the hydrologic cycle, leading to successive years of drought and rivers to stop flowing. Civilization collapses in search for water, people succumb to violence, and modern society retreats to primitivism. Ronson’s voice-over narration describes his thoughts, fears, and reactions as he navigates through this psychic desert, documenting his last days and society’s disintegration.
The visual materials filmed by the artist in the Dead Sea area (using a 16mm camera) are joined by the fictional narration. Thus, documentation and fiction intertwine - a hallmark of Russo’s approach in each new work. This blending undermines our sense of time. Viewing this film instills a sense of infinite, void, spaceless time ("The beach is a zone without time"). Echoes of violence and scarcity, murmurs of a collapsing environment—all portrayed as an inevitable fate revealed in all its glory.
The film draws on the dystopian ethos depicted in books by J.G. Ballard, Frank Herbert, and Brian Oldies. Many of these novels have been adapted into movies, whose DNA is also found in Sinkholes. The film also pays tribute to the American land artist Robert Smithson (who died at 35 in a helicopter crash while surveying one of his works). One of Smithson's best-known works is Spiral Jetty, a massive installation of basalt rocks in Utah's Great Salt Lake. Russo's film also references Smithson's Leaning Mirrors and Yucatan Mirror Displacements: installations of mirrors inside and outside the gallery, which explore the artist’s ideas about "site" and "non-site," raising questions about nature and culture, reality, and representation. Russo further alludes to Smithson's concept of "ruins in reverse" (entropy)—the world's movement toward chaos.
In addition to the new work, the exhibition presents Haus Atlantis (2016), a film named after the architectural monument at its center — Haus Atlantis, a cultural institution established in Bremen, Germany, in 1931. It was designed to fulfill art patron Ludwig Roselius’s vision of a cultural research institute that blends Norse mythologies, pseudo-science, ancient symbols, and futuristic architecture to restore the identity of the German race. In this film, distant times converge; the distant past is no less imagined than the equally distant future.
It is hard to imagine works more suited to our times, an era defined by the timelessness of catastrophe and its historical and mythical dimensions, when thoughts scatter among ruins and culture disintegrates.
