Condition of Suspended Present

To walk through Nataliya Zuban’s time-obstructing, auto-destructive, and self-obliterating process exhibition is an experience of intense listening. Born in 1992 in Ukraine’s Opishnia—whose clay-rich soil gave the artist a material inheritance of generations of narrative sculpture—the artist’s machines express the sound of contemporary waiting and sheltering; arbitrating; and the shrillness of expectance.
An auto-destruct ceramic forest of sculptures slowly compresses, destroying the ceramic spindles as they crash to the floor over the course of three months. The second hands of eleven clock sculptures tick loudly, but are obstructed by stone-like ceramic forms.
Broken pieces of sculpture are thrown into a menacing, roaring, ripping machine, that grinds them down to sand—loud and deafening, it eats up all the volume of air and space, eats up the present.
If together, this is an artistic treatise on violence, it is one that describes not just what happens to the ceramics, urbanities, landscapes being crushed and pulverised; it also potently materialises how the gears that exert pressure themselves begin to concuss and self-destruct over the course of the exhibition.
New ceramics by Nataliya Zuban were created during the Artist in Residence Program as part of ASoP Europe (Artists’ Solidarity Program), hosted by OÖ Landes-Kultur GmbH in collaboration with the Academy of Ceramics Gmunden, and supported by the Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs of the Republic of Austria.
Technical partner: Kees Reedijk (Amsterdam), Uwe Federer (Fablab, unibz, Bolzano).