Skip to main content

Art and Politics

Louise Martin-Chew
Eyeline 87
The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...

Walking into Nicholas Mangan’s exhibition at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art (IMA) is to experience an environment some distance from the traditional white-walled, pristine gallery. Even in the era of festival-style installations, the atmosphere between rooms segues from aquarium, to industrial laboratory, to a basement-style electrical set-up. Mangan is described by Patrick Hartigan as, ‘Equal parts geologist, anthropologist and sleuth’,1 and this exhibition engages with histories—research concerning Nauru, the unsustainable practice of mining, and the failed currency of Bitcoin—that have been concealed from view (via fair means or foul), and it wreaks a visual transformation through their telling.

The exhibition’s title refers to an economics book, Limits to Growth (Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III, 1972), which examined growth, the earth’s limited resources, and the way that technology responds to economic change. The didacticism of Mangan’s work demands audience time and attention, and becomes a significant part of its strength, yet, even at the more superficial level, there are powerful visual connections in this exhibition. The coral coffee table in the final room is made from Nauruan rock reused from a sculpture originally installed in front of a Melbourne high rise building, then Nauru House, long since decommissioned, and symptomatic of the failure of the phosphate extraction economy upon which Nauru relied. The coffee table is a mysterious relic: ancient, porous, exotic, echoed in the accompanying video. Mangan’s exhibition is unashamedly political but, with it, industrial and ambitious, drawing us into the salutary tale of Nauru’s boom to bust exploitation of its mining resources, relationships between Rio Tinto and the Queensland government, and a compelling video and soundscape that explores the trajectory... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Nicholas Mangan, Limits to Growth, 2016. Detail. Installation view, Limits to Growth, Institute of Modern Art, 2016. Photograph Carl Warner.

Nicholas Mangan, Limits to Growth, 2016. Detail. Installation view, Limits to Growth, Institute of Modern Art, 2016. Photograph Carl Warner.

Fiona Foley, Dispersed, 2008. Charred laminated wood and aluminium, letter D pitted with .303 inch calibre bullets

Fiona Foley, Dispersed, 2008. Charred laminated wood and aluminium, letter D pitted with .303 inch calibre bullets