Artists

Maren Karlson

Press release

Last year, Maren Karlson began working with four photographs taken inside Kombinat VEB Chemische Werke Buna in the 1970s and 80s, a factory in Schkopau, East Germany that produced rubber and plastic. The photos show the decaying interior of the factory while it was still operational: a rotting floor, an eroding ceiling about to collapse, twisted pipes and a hole in the ground. The state-owned factory would continue to operate until the fall of the Berlin Wall and its eventual privatisation in the mid 1990s. Today, the factory is owned by the American company Dow Chemicals, one of the largest chemical producers in the world. At the factory, the water used for the internal processes is taken from the nearby Saale river, subjected to various chemical processes and eventually returned to the river, to be used by another factory downstream, where the cycle begins again. As a result of this consistent usage, the water between the factories slowly heats up. Karlson understands this overheating of water as an insurgence: no longer serving its intended purpose within the factory, the water rises up from within and can no longer be controlled, burning through the system that contains it. The transformative role of this water, its changing states within the production cycle of the factory and its eventual perceived insurrection, inform the logic of Karlson’s nine new paintings in Staub (Störung).