IT`S NEVER ENOUGH
Air Quality Index 420
Huangpu River, Shanghai 2013
Video Loop (15:39 min.) Low Res Version
Music:
Symphony of Sorrowful Songs
Arrangement by Edward Stumpp
Watching the flat-bottomed barges in Benedikt Partenheimer’s video loop ‘It’s Never Enough’ (2013), as they roll down the Huangpu River before slowly disappearing into the rosy mist, I grow sleepy. It’s the soft, pastel hues, and the slower-than-a-waltz tempo of the ambient music that accompanies the footage. They conspire to lull me into a dream state, bordering on complete somnolence. When I read the description of the piece, in which Partenheimer reveals that the rosy hues are the product not of artistic artifice but of man-made chemical particles—pollution, in other words—a sense of unease arouses me from my slumber. This is the stuff of which not dreams but nightmares are made.
If ever there were a more apt metaphor for the state of our world today, of the unperceived dangers that lie ahead as we teeter on the edge of cooking our planet above 2 degrees higher than it can withstand, I cannot think of one. Collectively, we, the human inhabitants of this planet, have been gently rocked into a state of waking slumber, sleep-walking our way, through the mists of short-term gain at the cost of long-term life, into catastrophe. It’s this tension between beauty and the abyss that Partenheimer’s work captures in such moving and evocative ways, earning him the Berlin Art Prize last year for, in the jury’s words, “[his] thoughtful and sincere approach to visualizing climate change.”
Text: Michelle Standley for BerlinArtLink, 2017
Air Quality Index 420
Huangpu River, Shanghai 2013
Video Loop (15:39 min.) Low Res Version
Music:
Symphony of Sorrowful Songs
Arrangement by Edward Stumpp
Watching the flat-bottomed barges in Benedikt Partenheimer’s video loop ‘It’s Never Enough’ (2013), as they roll down the Huangpu River before slowly disappearing into the rosy mist, I grow sleepy. It’s the soft, pastel hues, and the slower-than-a-waltz tempo of the ambient music that accompanies the footage. They conspire to lull me into a dream state, bordering on complete somnolence. When I read the description of the piece, in which Partenheimer reveals that the rosy hues are the product not of artistic artifice but of man-made chemical particles—pollution, in other words—a sense of unease arouses me from my slumber. This is the stuff of which not dreams but nightmares are made.
If ever there were a more apt metaphor for the state of our world today, of the unperceived dangers that lie ahead as we teeter on the edge of cooking our planet above 2 degrees higher than it can withstand, I cannot think of one. Collectively, we, the human inhabitants of this planet, have been gently rocked into a state of waking slumber, sleep-walking our way, through the mists of short-term gain at the cost of long-term life, into catastrophe. It’s this tension between beauty and the abyss that Partenheimer’s work captures in such moving and evocative ways, earning him the Berlin Art Prize last year for, in the jury’s words, “[his] thoughtful and sincere approach to visualizing climate change.”
Text: Michelle Standley for BerlinArtLink, 2017