In a room thick with reminiscence, there’s a factor — that’s the closest phrase I’ve for it — irradiated by late afternoon gentle. Earlier than your eyes, it toggles between which means and pointlessness, resembling, by turns, a rocking horse-like toy set atop a glimmering metallic ocean of plastic wrappers, like a chariot driving towards salvation, and a municipal-orange tossaway randomly positioned on a heap of different nothings. Not an emblem, merely proof that one thing harmful occurred.
Ser Serpas’s objects, which fill the primary room, set the tone and tempo for The Gatherers, an exhibition of 14 worldwide artists that deal in rubbish and surplus, waste and extra, at MoMA PS1 — a museum in a former public college constructing in one of the crucial quickly growing elements of the borough and metropolis. It attracts our consideration to a rising aesthetic of building, destruction, and the palimpsests left by the too-quick biking between the 2. It units up human manufacturing — not as people, nor as small teams, as an emergent property of our international collectivity — as a power of recent sublimity, as highly effective in up to date artwork as nature was to the Romantics.
Ser Serpas, “tube of brief cadavers made sadder still” (2025), blended media
The commonest technique on this exhibition is to reframe the detritus of capitalism as formally attention-grabbing. Bosnian artist Selma Selman, as an illustration, presents an industrial nail gilded with gold extracted from motherboards scrapped by her household’s steel recycling enterprise (“Nail,” 2025) and a building claw repurposed as a blossom that opens and closes with a loud, grinding noise (“Flowers of Life,” 2025). Klara Liden’s “Untitled (Membrane 5)” (2025) is a slab of roofing materials that appears each bit like an intentional work of abstraction. British artist’s Nick Relph’s dye sublimation aluminum prints include 1:1 reproductions of metropolis surfaces and signages, finding artwork in ignored niches of the town.
It’s Georgian artist Tolia Astakhishvili who most efficiently gestures to the sublimity of human overproduction, doing so by way of a mechanics of exhaustion. In Astakhishvili and David Perice’s two-channel video “so many things I’d like to tell you” (2025), objects like a crushed coke can, a spoon, and a packet of tablets cross by a scanner. These acquainted objects, made uncanny on this medical context, as if sourced from an archaeological dig sooner or later, are attention-grabbing at first; then the eye flags. It’s the distinction between being directed towards a very witty piece of subway graffiti and being requested to look at each tile in a station.
These methods — drawing consideration to the formal qualities of that which we’ve collectively authored within the type of overproduction, and to the impossibility of actually greedy the vastness of overproduction as people — make for an attention-grabbing exhibition, however I’m not satisfied that it’s sufficient to really maintain a creative motion. Even on this context, sure methods, efficient at first, started to really feel both repetitive or skinny, resembling video artwork as a instrument to precise deep time. Considerably counterintuitively, it’s a piece in presumably probably the most primitive media right here — portray — that felt among the many handiest. Samuel Hindolo’s “Gare de Bruxelles-Nord” (2024) is de Chirico-like in its virtually hieroglyphic compositional readability. In its delirious juxtaposition of acquainted parts — sphinx, staircase, sky — it destabilizes in methods inconceivable and acquainted.
Samuel Hindolo, “Galgenberg Hill” (2024), oil on canvas
Movie nonetheless from Andro Eradze, “Flowering and Fading” (2024)
Ser Serpas, “multiplied empty sassafras more gently exonerated trailing talented friend guide me” (2025), blended media
Set up view of Tolia Astakhishvili and Dylan Perice, “so many things I’d like to tell you” (2025)
Klara Liden, “Untitled (Membrane 5)” (2024), bitumen sheeting (roofing materials), aluminum asphalt paint, andplywood
Set up view of works by Nick Relph
The Gatherers continues at MoMA PS1 (22-25 Jackson Avenue, Queens, New York) by October 6. The exhibition was curated by Ruba Katrib with Sheldon Gooch and Serena Moscardelli.
