Mariele Neudecker in conversation with curators Maria Hinel, Indira Ziyabek

Join us for a conversation with Mariele Neudecker, participating artist in Carbon, Carbon Everywhere, in dialogue with curators Indira Dyussebayeva-Ziyabek and Maria Hinel. Neudecker’s work often explores landscapes, perception, and the human relationship with the environment. This discussion will open up the themes of the exhibition, tracing carbon’s shifting states across bodies, ecologies, and time.

Artist bio:

Mariele Neudecker, was born in Germany, studied there, in Ireland and the UK, and is now based in Bristol, UK. She has exhibited her work widely all around the globe.

In her work Neudecker is exploring the interphases and overlaps of the two and three-dimensional, as well as analogue and digital. She uses a broad range of media including sculpture, film, photography as well as sound, with the quest to find a ‘Contemporary Sublime’.

Her practice often takes her – and us – to the threshold of human experience, she tests our perception of natural and technological worlds. Neudecker often uses technology’s virtual capabilities in order to reproduce a heightened experience of landscape, weather and climatic changes. For her, technology both enables and limits our perception and experience of the worlds we inhabit.

Solo exhibitions include Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Tate St Ives and Tate Britain, Kunstmuseum Trondheim, Norway, Zeppelin Museum, Germany and she has shown widely in international group exhibitions. Neudecker is currently working on SEDIMENT, a solo exhibition at Limerick City Gallery of Art this autumn, which will tour to Hestercombe Gallery in 2020. She also is currently working on a new commission for the CERN Collection, Geneva.

Neudecker is Professor and Research Fellow at Bath Spa University, Fellow for CERN’s Visiting Artists Program and is on the European Commission’s JRC SciArt advisory panel. She works with Galerie Barbara Thumm Berlin, Thomas Rehbein Galerie Cologne, Galeria Pedro Cera, Lisbon and in camera galerie in Paris.

About the show:

Carbon, Carbon Everywhere is a group exhibition featuring artists Emii Alrai, Kate Daudy & Konstantin Novoselov, Susan Eyre, Simon Faithfull, Ania Mokrzycka, Nissa Nishikawa, Mariele Neudecker, Anousha Payne, Aimée Parrott, Lucia Pizzani, Lizi Sanchez, and Meng Zhou. Co-curated by Indira Dyussebayeva-Ziyabek and Maria Hinel

Integral to the constitution of our bodies, soil, air and some rocks, carbon is a highly bonding element that incessantly transmutes from state to state, each particle challenging the boundaries between life and non-life. Bringing together works by twelve international artists, Carbon, Carbon Everywhere explores the shifting states of carbon, an element that threads through organic and inorganic matter, linking bodies, environments, and temporal scales.

The title of the exhibition is a quote from the landmark essay titled Carbon by the writer and chemist Primo Levi. In the essay, Levi traces a journey of a single particle of carbon across distinct states and beings, from resting on a rock edge for hundreds of millions of years, to entering the world of ‘things that change’ – swiftly shifting from the atmosphere to the lungs of a falcon, to the sea, to the trunk of a cedar, and eventually entering the writer’s own body from a glass of milk on his desk. Resolutely specific yet universal, Levi’s story highlights the singularity of carbon as an element that inherently connects all things through its relentless transformation. It fossilises, mutates, preserves, pollutes and nourishes. From its

ancient geological formations to its current atmospheric volatility, carbon is never still, shifting between forms and contexts in an ongoing process of exchange.

Featuring the works across distinct media, such as sculpture, painting, ceramics, video, installation, and material experimentation, the exhibition examines carbon through an entanglement of time and space. It asks how matter shifts meaning across bodies and systems. Making visible otherwise unseen physical processes of transformation and exchange, the works on view reflect on the notions of timelessness and change, preservation and destruction, order and chance, highlighting with palpable lucidity that everything is connected to everything else.