KERNEL
Water Sleeps
11.11.- 23.12.2016
Polansky Gallery, Prague
In Water Sleeps, Athens-based art collective KERNEL looks at a network of geopolitical phenomena related to global-scale logistical projects and their multimodal impacts on the contemporary socioeconomic context of Greece. Part of these shifts, the destabilization of the historically prevailing local maritime industry due to foreign privatization of critical port areas induced unprecedented mutations in customary labor conditions and developed novel parasitic economies during the last decade.
By engaging with sculptural gestures and digitally generated moving imagery, KERNEL encodes in their work the processes of material, human and informational movement, their frictions and their contingent byproducts. In the exhibition, landscapes constructed by disposed cable jackets collected from suburban junkyard areas around Athens act as material traces that link back to the obscure emergent industries of scrap stealing and recycling. Processed data transforms into abstracted sea routes, current envisions of the mythologized ancient Silk Road. Acoustic phenomena engendered by the intensive workings of computational infrastructures become the uncanny melodies of the automated protocols that orchestrate present-day life.
In Water Sleeps KERNEL looks at the sea, at the perpetual poetics reflecting on its surface, the powers embedded in its mass, the politics inscribed on its routes.