Dark Matter

Presented by: Victor Brim

2020, 4K video, 19'52”, color, sound

Man-made landscapes without people. Gigantic colossi of steel excavating the rock. Fissured earth, smoking chimneys, piles of scrap metal. Viktor Brim documents places from the past and present of the production of raw materials: the extractive economy on which modern life is based. In addition to the almost incomprehensible dimension of these places, the processes have a temporality that can only be grasped over time. For this reason, the artist's camera stops when he observes, registers, records. Daniel Burkhardt writes of Brim's video art: "By precisely timing his gaze and precisely cropping the image, he manages seemingly effortlessly to let what he sees speak for itself." In this way, Brim manages without any comment. Instead, the finely arranged sound conveys the incessant hum of machines.

His paintings bear witness with their audiovisual force to the legacies of the industrial exploitation of the planet, which continues unabated even under the impact of climate catastrophe. In his most recent film, Dark Matter (2020), Brim introduces a new level of abstraction: From the dense fog, debris, electric poles and dimly lit industrial plants faintly crystallize. The apparently apocalyptic scenery alternates with landscapes whose rugged forms evoke the fall of a velvet cloth. Finally, the camera plunges into the gaping hole of the world's largest pipe of so-called kimberlite at Mirny in Yakutia, northeastern Siberia, which is surrounded by concentric roads. The contours of the diamond mine are lost in the deep black of the abyss, like an infinitely slow fall into the bottomless depths.