Miriam Austin: Andesite
Opening: 9 December, 12 – 8pm
9 December 2020 – 30 October 2021
Bosse & Baum, London



The exploitation of the earth gives birth to two children: the widow Annie Kelly, raising her children in a tent in 19th-century Aoteroa New Zealand, and, beneath the ground, the blind god Adoh, whose hundred unseeing eyes are witness to a dark future.

Andesite, Miriam Austin’s third solo show at Bosse & Baum, is set at the threshold between these two worlds: the mythical subterranean city of Selvaga, in which organic technologies are manufactured, promising reprieve from ecological crisis; and the real, ancestral story of Annie Kelly, Austin’s great-great-grandmother. The works in Andesite continue a conversation with the dead, opening up the psychic and earthy spaces of extractive industry, colonial settlement, and matrilineal communion.

In Selvaga, floppy machines harness the energy of Alset, the rider who moves through time and slips between zones. Ehusea is a figure of technological sacrifice, vulnerable yet protective, aggressively reaching towards a post-carbon future. Andesite does not resolve the question of whether the disaster has already occurred: the fragile products of human ingenuity are in permanent conflict with geological scales and processes.


For more info please see: 
http://www.bosseandbaum.com/