NYAB Event - Marina Zurkow “MORE&MORE (the invisible oceans)”

Marina Zurkow “MORE&MORE (the invisible oceans)”

Bitforms Gallery

This event has ended.

bitforms gallery presents MORE&MORE (the invisible oceans), Marina Zurkow’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

The ocean makes up 71 percent of our planet’s surface. So, how is it that we know more about Mars than the marine environments of Earth? As impenetrable as the deep oceans are to humans, we imperviously live in a black box of international shipping, reducing the ocean to a surface rather than an environmental force. MORE&MORE is a socioeconomic, post-natural foray into the infrastructure of global trade: a systemic means to a never-ending end of economic growth. Here, the Harmonized System Commodity Description and Coding System, or Harmonized System (HS), rules the world. With roughly 26,000 items in 99 categories, the HS tariff code is an opaque, granular (yet oblique) language unto itself. Everything is reduced to code; the ocean all but disappears.

Zurkow visualizes the Harmonized System as a series of iconographic tchotchkes, unifying disparate commodities into a phantasmagoric depot. MORE&MORE: China, India, Japan, Mexico, Turkey, USA (2016) are six sculptural animations, with custom algorithmic software generating hypnotic patterns of export products. Changing weather, the rising and setting sun, and cycles of the moon illustrate that while time passes, ports are always open and shipping never stops.

A physical firewall of HS code is wallpapered throughout the gallery space. In a kiosk at the gallery’s entrance, handmade chocolates and soaps shaped as HS code icons, postcards from major port nations, and swimsuits visualizing trade relations between countries are displayed as retail goods.* Sculptures made of 3D powder, plaster, fungus, and coffee husk are respectively indicative of a given supply chain: while 3D powder is sourced from China, fungus could be grown in one’s backyard. According to Zurkow, “If the Earth was Joseph Beuys, fungus would be its felt.”