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Online | Exhibition ‘Stranger to the Trees’ by Kat Austen at post-gallery .online

Kat Austen
„Stranger to the Trees”
@post-gallery .online
Premiere: 21/11/20 Saturday 4pm (CET)
Opened until: 29/11/20
https://www.post-gallery.online/katausten [1]

Kat Austen’s Stranger to the Trees is a new media project exploring the complementary coexistence of microplastics and trees as carbon sinks. How do trees and microplastics coexist in forests, capturing carbon in the time of the climate crisis? Stranger to the Trees’ two channels of video orient around a musical composition combining traditional instruments, hacked instruments and field recordings. One video, an analogue silhouette animation mixed with live-action video, explores the macro perspective of this coexistence. The other, incorporating results from a scientific experiment into the effect of microplastics on birch trees, explores the micro perspective. Together, they query the response of forest ecosystems to the ubiquitous and irrevocable dispersal of microplastics around the Earth.

Credits:
The Work was realised within the framework of the European Media Art Platforms EMARE program at WRO Art Center with support of the Creative Europe Culture Programme of the European Union.

Project realised with RAM – Rebel Art Management.

Scientific experts:  Joana MacLean,  Section 3.7 – Geomicrobiology, German Centre for Geoscience. Daniel Balanzategui, Natural Sciences Unit, German Archaeological Institute and Section 4.3 – Climate Dynamics and Landscape Evolution, German Centre for Geosciences.

Simon Barraclough

Photo:  Andreas Baudisch

Kat Austen is a person. In her artistic practice, she focusses on environmental issues. She melds disciplines and media, creating sculptural and new media installations, performances and participatory work. Austen’s practice is underpinned by extensive research and theory, and driven by a motivation to explore how to move towards a more socially and environmentally just future.

Working from her studio in Berlin, Austen is currently Artist in Residence at the Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences, University College London and Senior Teaching Fellow at UCL Arts and Sciences. She is a member of the bbk, an inaugural member of the London Creative Network and is co-founder of the DIY Hack the Panke collective in Berlin.

Austen’s field research has included a voyage around the Canadian High Arctic as Artist in the Arctic 2017 for Friends of Scott Polar Research Institute (University of Cambridge) for her project The Matter of the Soul. In 2018 Austen was selected as inaugural Cultural Fellow in Art and Science at the Cultural Institute, University of Leeds for the same project. Austen has been awarded residencies internationally, including with NYU Shanghai, ArtOxygen Mumbai, LAStheatre, the Clipperton Project and Utter! Spoken word.

Austen has exhibited at Bonhams Art Gallery, London; The Polar Museum, Cambridge; Kuehlhaus, Berlin, among others, and her work is held internationally in private collections. She has performed around the globe, including at Opera North, Leeds; Fusion Festival, Berlin and Headlands Center for the Arts, San Francisco.

https://www.katausten.com/ [2]

Post-Gallery .online is an independent digital art gallery started by Estonian artists Kelli Gedvil and Kristen Rästas in the spring of 2020. The goal of the gallery is to be available in every corner of the world, because the exhibitions do not require a physical space. The art exhibitions are carefully curated according to the possibilities and peculiarities offered by the web environment which gets built from scratch for every new exhibition. Each art exhibition is based on the principle that it covers the entire website with no other references or extraneous information, ensuring the purest and most aesthetic solution possible. Post-Gallery.online aims to provide contemporary artists a safe space to exhibit their work and to find solutions on how to bring their physical or not-so-physical artworks naturally to a digital environment.