Oliver Ressler
Images of protest play on the walls of the dark basement of the Cultural Centre of Belgrade, in one of Europe’s most polluted cities. Comprising Vienna-based artist Oliver Ressler’s five-channel video installation Everything’s coming together while everything’s falling apart, 2016–19, they amount to more than a reminder of the obvious perils of carbon dependency and climate change. Rather, they represent the struggle of multitudes, gasping for breath against the necropolitics of extraction.
In Ressler’s five films, activists throughout Europe occupy sites of drilling and excavation (a coalfield outside of Berlin, for example, and a mine in North Bohemia); commodity circulation (such as the port of Amsterdam, one of the world’s largest coal harbors); and political failure—namely, of the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, which, like so many palavers before and after, fell short of producing any binding policy to combat global warming. Another work focuses on Zone to Defend (ZAD), a militant occupation against the development of an airport in France. The carnivalesque spectacle of civil disobedience—complete with colorful signs and solidaristic chants—confronts rigid lines of uniformed policemen and brightens gray industrial landscapes, like a butterfly landing on a lump of coal. Despite their exuberance, Ressler’s images transcend flower-power clichés, picturing nothing less than a confrontation with empire. The white coveralls worn by protesters in many of the films symbolically undercut the neutralizing paradigm of difference within dominant structures.
Can one really hope to cure a disease within the anthropocentric systems that have created it? This exhibition, like all humanistic appeals to representation, is not immune to this question. Nonetheless, it would be wrongheaded to claim that Ressler reinforces the institution of art by co-opting eco-activism. The struggle against ecological apocalypse inevitably connects institutions and dissidents alike. As Ressler’s title implores, everything must come together—and fast—before everything falls apart.
