No Natural Disaster at HORSEANDPONY Fine Arts

Artists: Diana Artus, Caitlin Berrigan, Tamen Perez, Armita Raafat, Viktor Timofeev, Clémence de La Tour du Pin

Exhibition title: No Natural Disaster

Venue: HORSEANDPONY Fine Arts, Berlin, Germany

Date: November 27 – December 19, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and HORSEANDPONY Fine Arts, Berlin

Below sea level in the desert, we are buffered from the ocean by a wall of dry mountains.
The only soft body here is the desert floor, absorbed by the accidental flood
of a river, rerouted.
Postcards of a resort oasis show blue water,
bronzed bodies, white boats and yellow blossomed date palms.
Now full of metal and oxygen-eating microbes, the sea’s fish thrown in for sport are suffocating the smell of them fills the air
even after their carcasses have dried.
No horizon or colors distinguish
the wet from the dry, sea from desert,
but as you approach, your foot sinks a bit deeper and a trail of debris starts with toilet tanks in shards, whorls of barbed wire, collapsed trailer shacks
and merges with a thick fringe of fish bones
where the desert is drying itself out, returning to salt. The valley is an unfirm fault.
Mud volcanoes on its rim belch soaked sand in the air.
To this din of mountain dust the only contrast
is black obsidian boulders from the last eruption 2000 years ago, which we steal and break
a bottle of wine for Pele
staining the butte red so she won’t be angry
so the dates stuck in our teeth will still taste sweet.

After annihilation
I am becoming mineral

This is no natural disaster
it is just the natural
consequence of two people, fucking,
having fucked. Fuck

the tourists and their picnics
fuck this measured green leisure
fuck all the children
discovering the softness of grass

-Caitlin Berrigan

Tamen Perez, Pintoras #3, 2016, acrylic on canvas 70 x 90 cm

Tamen Perez, Untitled, 2016, 42.5 x 30 cm, mixed media on paper

Diana Artus, The big other (Starschnitt eins + zwei), 2016, xerox prints, taped together to a size of 174 x 120 cm and two publications, xerox printed, 41 x 29 cm

Armita Raafat, Untitled, 2016, mixed media, 216 x 20 x 103 cm

Tamen Perez, Pintoras #4, 2016, acrylic on canvas 70 x 90 cm

Clémence de La Tour du Pin, Untitled (caduceus), 2016, brass, 7.5 x 154 x 33.5 cm

Diana Artus, The big other (Starschnitt eins + zwei), 2016, xerox prints, taped together to a size of 174 x 120 cm and two publications, xerox printed, 41 x 29 cm

Clémence de La Tour du Pin, Snake, 2016, brass, 12 x 84 x 12 cm

Viktor Timofeev, Sazarus 4 (short), 2016, Single channel video with sound 3’17”