Video Studio Visit with Paul Kolling

Video by Mona // July 30, 2024

Paul Kolling is a Berlin-based artist and a founding member of terra0. His solo work delves into the social and spatial politics of infrastructure, offering new perspectives and interpretations of the visual field while raising questions about the nature of mediated perception. Often fusing analog and digital technologies, he works across film, video, installation and sculpture to explore how particular perspectives and possibilities are foregrounded or obscured by complex infrastructures. Kolling’s artistic inquiries encompass both natural and man-made environments, focusing on how perception, recording and classification become sites for power and agency struggles.

Kolling’s 2020 work ‘Westbound – 190621’ is featured in the group exhibition ‘Survival in the 21st Century’ at Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, which explores the foundations of life in the age of polycrisis. In this video, presented collaboratively with Deichtorhallen on the occasion of their group show, Kolling invites viewers into his Berlin studio. He discusses his large-scale work consisting of five illuminated panels in which a series of images shows 9,840 kilometers of train tracks between the cities of Zhengzhou and Hamburg. Created with a mixture of analog and digital techniques, this piece involved collecting 320 meters of images on 35mm film. While it originally aimed to highlight the geopolitical fantasy of the new Silk Road, its presentation at Deichtorhallen also focuses on the genocidal persecution of the Uyghur Muslim minority in China. The camps were unintentionally captured in Kolling’s footage and were later re-contextualized following the research findings of Alison Killing. Kolling exposes the injustices associated with economic progress, revealing the conflict between the global (human governance of the Earth) and the planetary (Earth as an interconnected and interdependent system of human and non-human nature).