Nothing Beside Remains

The exhibition Nothing Beside Remains by Lise Autogena & Joshua Portway is a reflection on the passage of time, the perishability of power and the anatomy of ruins in a world where the uncontested rule of man over nature is facing decline. The exhibited works investigate our perspectives as humans on the collapse of complex systems: from romantic poems telling the story of imperious rulers and their fallen empires, via self-organising ant colonies to the risk of total ecological collapse. Taking a cross-disciplinary approach, the artists present the audience with visualisations of complex data sets, a recreation of the suicidal, but strangely ritualistic phenomenon of an ant mill and the slow flooding of Regelbau 411’s bunker calibrated according to the rate at which the global sea levels are rising. Thus, the works essentially address the issue of the altered timescales introduced by the concept of the Anthropocene. How to relate to questions of power and finality, when viewing human history in relation to planetary processes and an unfathomable future? How does it affect our self-perception, when hours, days, weeks and years no longer suffice as measurements of time? Regelbau 411’s bunkers constitute a leitmotif for the exhibition, the ruin standing as a symbol of the slow negation of everything permanent: the desert of time blows in from the vast beaches at Oddesund, where everything meets us as scattered fragments on their way towards final dissolution.