by Alison Hugill // Jan. 10, 2025
This article is part of our feature topic Cycles.
At the top of our news cycles right now are the devastating wildfires engulfing much of Los Angeles. These kinds of climate catastrophes, like the recent Hurricane Milton that made landfall in Florida in October or the severe flooding in the UAE, India and Spain (to name just a few places) last year, are becoming increasingly common and also sound the alarm about the state of our planet.
Yet, a news cycle—which refers to the time that elapses before one set of stories is replaced by another—suggests that reports like these will quickly drop in relevance. In many ways, this contemporary “breaking news” approach to journalism fuels a hunger for immediacy and sensationalism that is rarely compatible with the reality of lived events. How does this type of reporting contribute to maintaining a state of crisis?
Tega Brain & Sam Lavigne: ‘Carbon Media Cycle’ // Copyright Tega Brain & Sam Lavigne
With the recent group exhibition ‘Teleconnections’ at D21 Kunstraum Leipzig, curator Sybille Neumeyer explores her long-term artistic research on the narratives and aesthetics of climate crises. As she explains about the exhibition: “Political, cultural and social atmospheres are shaped by the influence of the media, and technologically produced climate narratives (re)produce power relations.” Sumugan Sivanesan spoke to Neumeyer as part of this featured topic, to learn more about the ways in which the media maintains a stronghold on climate news and what that might mean in the long-run.
Sonja Hornung & Daniele Tognozzi // Copyright Michael Moser
Despite this admittedly ominous propensity to constant replacement, the term “cycle” also leaves open the possibility of a return. Cycles of the seasons or life cycles offer, for example, comforting natural analogs to the ways we make sense of life and death through storytelling and art. In the work of Berlin-based artist Dan Lie, who was recently awarded the Preis der Nationalgalerie, constant change is encouraged and welcomed by the use of organic materials. Reflecting on the role of grief in their work in a recent interview, Lie spoke about the challenges of documenting artworks that appear so differently with time: “Once somebody or a whole ecosystem dies, we lose their physical presence. What lingers from the person, animal, system, is that we had a connection to them. We have photographs of them, video, audio, messages, letters, memories. These are all testimonies, and I tend to think of documentation of my art in the same way. But experiencing the installation remains the starting point to developing a relationship to the work.”
Dan Lie in collaboration with non-humans: ‘The Reek,’ 2024, site-specific Installation, Preis der Nationalgalerie 2024, Hamburger Bahnhof // Courtesy Dan Lie, © Jacopo La Forgia
Similarly, Vera Kox’s recent exhibition ‘Sentient Soil’ at Konschthal Esch in Luxembourg employs mineral life forms to speak about the transformational processes within landscapes, which are often perceived as static. As Dagmara Genda writes in her introduction to our upcoming interview with Kox, “in using both artificial and natural, not to mention living, materials, Kox envisions an art production in the process of unleashing itself from the cycles of trend and history, yearning for the slower movement of geological time.” Art and its materials, too, are subject to their own cycles and questions of value inevitably arise when artists decide to work on more ephemeral planes.
Vera Kox: ‘Sentient Soil,’ 2024, installation view at Konschthal Esch // © Christof Weber/Konschthal Esch, courtesy of the artist
In another interview for the topic, William Kherbek speaks with groundbreaking Taiwanese artist Shu Lea Cheang, who was active in the early days of Net Art and will shortly open her exhibition at Haus der Kunst in Munich. Cheang’s ongoing piece ‘Composting the Net,’ which began in 2013, examines the ways in which the vast stratae of information that make up the early internet can be recycled by future generations. Looking at “data debris,” Cheang considers its value for future net archeologists.
Shu Lea Cheang: ‘UKI,’ film still // Courtesy of the artist and Haus der Kunst Munich
Many of the contributions to the “Cycles” topic have, perhaps unsurprisingly, remained close to the natural world and what we can learn from it, especially in the face of more conspicuous technologically-driven approaches to life and death. With recent escalations in the climate crisis on our minds, finally re-attuning human life to nature’s rhythms and cycles—if that is indeed still possible—feels a bit like our only hope.
