Exhibition curated by Lisa Rosendahl

Examining the concept of ‘Extraction’, Kunsthall Trondheim’s exhibition is an intersectional exploration, correlating the exploitation of the Earth with that of the human body, to compare the actual materiality of digital hardware with the promise of the immaterial experience it seduces us with.

Overspill – Universal Map, 2016 / 2018
Wall drawings printed on textile, posters, text and Deep Sea nodules from the Clarion Clipperton Fracture Zone (CCZ) in the Pacific Ocean, on loan from NTNU, Trondheim.

Rikke Luther’s four wall drawings, Overspill – Universal Map, plot the four conceptual territories of Global Commons. These areas – Antarctica, the High Seas, the Atmosphere and Outer Space – are vital to life on earth, but subject to rapidly increasing economic exploitation. The complex concept of Global Commons grew from 20th century international legal agreements relating to regions of the planet that are beyond the immediate territorial control of any one nation, but which encompass resources deemed common to mankind as a whole. Luther’s maps demonstrate how new technology and weak legal enforcement have resulted in increased exploitation and privatization of resources in the commons. Encompassing historical facts, political ideology, law and ecology, the maps trace the ways humanity attempts to understand, and exploit, the natural world, together with the intellectual systems that have been developed in order to define it.

Luther is also exhibiting elements from her recent work The Sand Bank. Mining: Sea Bed, which explores the effects of resource extraction, such as coastal sand mining, and the search for new minerals on the Deep Sea bed. The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, the world leader in this area, has kindly lent materials for this installation.

Together, these two works visualize the borders of a collapsing system of universalist thinking, where the frontiers of private extractive exploitation are continually expanding.