Visiting the Centre Pompidou in Paris I discovered the indian artist Vivan Sundaram who has created a series of photographs called “Trash”.The artist comments on contemporary politics through his radical art works. “Trash” has been shown in its entirety as a multimedia exhibition of installations, photographs and videos at Sepia in New York. The works address the aesthetics and social implications of urban waste and global consumption.

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The photographs show landscapes built of discarded objects which seem both familiar and strange. I found them to evoke an unsettling feeling of looking at something that I should recognize, without actually being able to. After a while I recognize fragments, but still I can´t really navigate through the landscape. I think the artist visualizes in a great way how objects transform to a different state when being discarded, but still stay the same. It is the context, state and location which make them difficult to recognize as the objects they once were. They exist in limbo between usefulness and end of life.

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The transition between the categories of useful objects (for example brick, tire, circuit board) and the collective category “trash” is decided by a complex combination of routines, social norms, material characteristics, state and function, technological and political development, but in the end it is the context and location that makes something “trash”.

Photo borrowed from Walsh Gallery

Photographed at Centre Pompidou

Photographed at Centre Pompidou

Photo borrowed from artnet