The Last Terminal: Reflections on the Coming Apocalypse (Part 2 — Natural Selection) at Rib

Contributors: Kianoosh Motallebi, Marije de Wit, Shahin Afrassiabi and Eleonore Pano-Zavaroni inviting Romain Bobichon, Fabrice Croux, Danaé Jérome, Ash Kilmartin, Akim Pasquet, Jérôme Tillié and Maziar Afrassiabi, Olivier Goethals, Albert Lamorisse, Mathew Kneebone, Susannah Wood

Exhibition title: The Last Terminal: Reflections on the Coming Apocalypse (Part 2 — Natural Selection)

Curated by: Maziar Afrassiabi

Venue: Rib, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Date: February 5 – March 26, 2022

Photography: Lotte Stekelenburg / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Rib, Rotterdam

Following the introduction of The Last Terminal: Reflections on the Coming Apocalypse in September and Part 1 — Survival of the Fittest: the big toe of little big man in November last year, we continued our journey with Part 2 — Natural selection in February 2022. Coinciding with the lockdown, several long blackouts befell us during the holiday, perhaps signaling this year’s cadence.

In the program, we gradually add new works and replace some of the existing ones building a narrative that evolves whilst we are rethinking our pathways and future.

From a Marvellous Faucet by Kianoosh Motallebi

In Part 2 — Natural selection, we introduce a new work by artist Kianoosh Motallebi titled From a Marvellous Faucet. This work is an outcome of our conversations about the current state of one of the protagonists in the program: Lamorisse’s crashed helicopter at the Amir Kabir dam in Karaj.

There is now a rickety helicopter suspended over the lake. It is allegedly, at the very spot Lamorisse’s helicopter got entangled into electrical cables and fell into the lake. There are two versions of the origins of this wrecked helicopter. In one account, the helicopter is the actual one that was salvaged from the bottom of the lake, and in the other, it is a mock-up. This somewhat odd dangling memento mori got us thinking in terms of monuments and accidents, liquids and collisions, finality and continuity. We got interested in accidents or collisions as moulds. Like when a car collides into an object and its metal deforms in accordance with the shape and qualities of the thing it has collided into. Whenever we see a wreckage, of any sort, we are drawn to its details, how the bends and kinks may have been formed. There is so much more detail in a wreck than in its original. We find ourselves absorbed in looking at it whilst imagining it reconstructed. It is a thinking process reminiscent of how we conceive sculpture as a practice.

Motallebi takes this phenomenon as the basis of a new sculptural work, embedding a lamp into paraffin which gradually melts it. This liquified paraffin is then pumped out of the solid object, appearing as a paraffin fountain elsewhere then landing into a hot bath. At the margins, the paraffin solidifies and gets once again integrated into the object. This process continues for at least a year, perhaps producing electrical charge and short circuits due to its attraction of environmental dust, threatening to compromise Kneebone’s work which itself throws the program into an operational uncertainty.

The Story of a Disaster Foretold by Eleonore Pano Zavaroni, Mathew Kneebone and Susannah Wood

We ring in the New Year with a foretelling of the future—a parallel reality steeped in uncertainty and speculation. The Story of a Disaster Foretold is a premonition composed of language drawn from news headlines, oracular literature, musings, and visions blended together in three acts by Eléonore Pano-Zavaroni, Mathew Kneebone, and Susannah Wood. The artists’ collaboration is founded on a shared interest in projection, a theme central to their individual projects exhibited at Rib (Afspraak Future and Power Relations) and inspired by Lamorisse’s premonitions of dying in the Caspian Sea, several kilometers north of the actual site of his death.

The work will be voiced by Susannah Wood who is a Bay Area actor, playwright, and—in a previous life—was a radio editor and reporter for the City News Bureau in Chicago.

Contingent on California’s suspect electrical grid, The Story of a Disaster Foretold will be broadcast live from San Francisco to Rib on Ever Widening Circles, a radio program by artist Ash Kilmartin via Radio Worm. The story will be introduced with a musical prelude by the Rib Staff Band, Linus Bonduelle, and Maziar Afrassiabi.

Damage control by Marije de Wit

For Part 2 — Natural selection, de Wit will introduce a new photographic work presented in a Lightbox. Part of a larger body of recent photographic works, it signals her departure from sculpture to centralize and document working in the studio with photography. Work at the studio consists of surrounding herself with photos, objects, and drawings, that in the process of making sculptures would have been subordinate to the artwork’s final outcome. The photos are still-life testimonies of compelling assemblages that appear to her in the studio, which she then further stages into a scenery. The photos dissolve distinctions between making and finding, stating and questioning, abstraction and daily life, and advocate an intuitive logic and ambiguity to aim for more and broader modes of communication and comprehension.

Mirror and Luz Aberrante by Shahin Afrassiabi

We introduce two new paintings by Shahin Afrassiabi titled Mirror and Luz Aberrante and remove Tronie (Thomas Houseago) and Ruin the world.

In a recent conversation with Shahin Afrassiabi, he said that he feels as if all of his experiences are distilled into these paintings, of life and of art. When looking at his paintings, it is not difficult to see that they have landed safely and calmly, as if after a long messy journey that is both personal and historical and arriving only with what is necessary to continue.

Overview Part 2:Natural Selection With works by Kianoosh Motallebi, Marije de Wit, Olivier Goethals, Mathew Kneebone, Shahin Afrassiabi, Albert Lamorisse, Eleonore Pano-Zavaroni inviting Romain Bobichon, Fabrice Croux, Danaé Jérome, Ash Kilmartin, Akim Pasquet, Jérôme Tillié and Maziar Afrassiabi, February 2022