Meeting point in the courtyard of the Museum Pankow:

Kultur- und Bildungszentrum Sebastian Haffner Hof
Prenzlauer Allee 227/228
10405 Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg

Saturday 7th May
17:30-20:00

Microplastics are tiny particles of plastic found everywhere across the planet. The majority of plastic in the environment today is made from petrochemicals. Released into the environment continuously for decades, plastic and microplastic particles accumulate. As long-lived traces of human activity, microplastics can now be detected almost everywhere – even in the remotest areas. Building on her previous DIY research into microplastics in soil and water ecosystems and how they coexist with trees and rocks, join artist Kat Austen for these first explorations into catching airborne microplastics using adapted fog-catchers.

Presented in the context of the NEUSTART Kultur funded installation of Stranger to the Trees in Großer Wasserspeicher in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, this workshop involves participatory research into the reverberations of petrochemical products.

Registration: studio@katausten.com

We are delighted to announce the double exhibition of Stranger to the Trees and This Land is Not Mine at the Großer Wasserspeicher, Berlin, alongside a live performance of This Land is Not Mine album and new workshop.

Exhibition Information

22^nd April 2022 – 8^th May 2022
Großer Wasserspeicher
Belforter Straße, 10405 Berlin

Exhibition opening: 22/04/2022, 6-10 pm, Großer Wasserspeicher

Opening hours: 23/04–08/05/2022, 12-8 pm daily, Thursdays 12–10 pm

This Land is Not Mine is premiering in the context of the Fossile Erfahrung exhibition by Prater Gallery in conversation with the solo exhibition of Stranger to the Trees in collaboration with post-gallery.online, presented in the context of Neustart Kultur. 

Performance

Kat will perform the entire This Land is Not Mine album in the Kleiner Wasserspeicher on the Berlin Gallery Weekend.

More info: Performance Evening with Kat Austen and Elske Rosenfeld

30th April 2022
6-8 pm
Kleiner Wasserspeicher
Belforter Straße, 10405 Berlin

Workshop Participatory Artistic Research: Exploring Airborne Microplastics

7th May 2022
Date and Location TBC

The live screening of The Matter of the Soul | Symphony video (1 hr) will take place on the 7th of March at The Big Freeze Polar Art festival run by The Polar Museum, Cambridge, UK. It will be followed by Q&A with Kat Austen.

The Matter of the Soul is a music, video, installation and performance work. It engenders empathy with the process of dispersal and transformation in the Arctic. The work draws an analogy between human migration, the movement of water from ice to ocean in the Arctic and changing identity online in the context of our contemporary climate emergency.

• Live event
• Time: 6pm GMT, 7pm CET, duration 1.5 hours
• Venue: Crowdcast (join live; register in advance for a reminder).
• Free

The research for The Matter of the Soul was carried out during the Artist in the Arctic Residency 2017 with Friends of SPRI, Bonhams and One Ocean Expeditions. The work was completed during a Cultural Fellowship in Art and Science (Climate Track) at the Cultural Institute, University of Leeds. The Matter of the Soul | Symphony premiered in October 2018 at Howard Assembly Rooms, Opera North, Leeds, UK.

More information on The Matter of the Soul.

21 Nov / Sat / 4 PM
https://www.post-gallery.online/katausten

Kat Austen’s Stranger to the Trees is a new media project exploring the complementary coexistence of microplastics and trees as carbon sinks. How do trees and microplastics coexist in forests, capturing carbon in the time of the climate crisis? Stranger to the Trees’ two channels of video orient around a musical composition combining traditional instruments, hacked instruments and field recordings. One video, an analogue silhouette animation mixed with live-action video, explores the macro perspective of this coexistence. The other, incorporating results from a scientific experiment into the effect of microplastics on birch trees, explores the micro perspective. Together, they query the response of forest ecosystems to the ubiquitous and irrevocable dispersal of microplastics around the Earth.

Through a co-operation with innovative online gallery post-gallery.online curated by Kelli Gedvil and Kristen Rästas, the release of Stranger to the Trees is reconfigured, hybridised like the trees themselves, to allow the meaning and affordance of the two channels of video to be conveyed through online media fit for pandemic times.

Credits
“The Work was realised within the framework of the European Media Art Platforms EMARE program at WRO Art Center with support of the Creative Europe Culture Programme of the European Union”.