David Hartt: Metabolic Rift

Every summer, a new temporary artwork is created for the garden of the Georg Kolbe Museum. This year, the artist David Hartt (*1967, Montréal) is presenting a newly commissioned video work entitled Metabolic Rift.

The large LED screen is embedded in the garden’s flora and is surrounded by a bed of fireweed (epilobium angustifolium) and small balsam (impatiens parviflora) – plants, thriving also in inhospitable environments. The small balsam (also Siberian balsam) found its way into botanical theories, which were reformulated into race theories at the beginning of the last century that were taken up by the National Socialists. The fireweed is known for its highly resistant spread and also grows in damaged or contaminated soil after wars or environmental disasters. In the immediate vicinity to Georg Kolbe’s Dancer’s Fountain (1922) and based on the poses of its figures a contemporary dancer practices a concentrated choreography. The model for Kolbe’s lithic carrier figures was a Black man, whose biography still needs to be reconstructed. The moving story of the fountain, told inside the museum and through the publication The Fountain, is the starting point for David Hartt’s artistic contemplation about interconnected relations between culture and environment, periphery and centre, Heimat and estrangement.

The title’s “metabolic rift” is a concept of Marxist ecology and was formulated by the sociologist John Bellamy Foster as a critique of capitalism. It describes a rift and a breakdown in the interdependent relationships between humans and nature in capitalist production systems and its far-reaching effects. With his work David Hartt asks what it means to be alienated from one’s own body in a foreign landscape. How to contaminate and thus enrich the ground as you pollinate it with a poetic Otherness.

David Hartt’s essay on the work can be read here.

David Hartt is a Canadian artist who creates multimedia works that critically address the social, cultural and economic complexities of his various subjects. Through films, photographs, sound, textiles and installations, he explores how historical ideas and ideals persist or change over time. An interest in modern architecture and botany informs many of his artistic explorations. David Hartt lives and works in Philadelphia, where he is Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. Hartt’s work is in the public collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, the Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, the Jewish Museum, New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, MCA, Chicago, MoCP, Chicago, MoMA, New York , the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, RISD Museum, Providence, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

On the opening day, Saturday, June 14th, the artist will discuss his art and his new work in a conversation with Kathleen Reinhardt, the director of the Georg Kolbe Museum.