A World Undone
Nicholas Mangan
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
5 April – 30 June, 2024
[Published in Art Asia Pacific no. 140, September 2024]
In a public conversation accompanying Nicholas Mangan’s comprehensive survey, underwater anthropologist Cameron Allan McKean described coral as a crucible for how thought in the 21st century might be articulated, transforming the ways we make sense of the world. Two decades of Mangan’s expanded sculptural practice similarly invited an undoing and a recomposing of who we are, in relation to each other and to the myriad other beings we share worlds with.
Regional political focus in recent years, as well as rising tensions between the devastating impacts of climate change and the Australian government’s sustained inaction, add meaning to Mangan’s older works. In Notes from a Cretaceous World and Diwoyogo’s Ancient Coral Coffee Table (both 2009–10), a postage stamp depicting the Earth from space floats on the wall opposite slices of prehistoric coral limestone appropriated as corporate decor. These break open—conceptually and physically—complexities tied up in the Pacific island of Nauru: historically heavily mined for phosphate by Australia, and now poised to begin deep-sea mining minerals for batteries as part of a global stagger toward net-zero emissions.
Next door, Ancient Lights (2015) connected its own solar battery to panels on the museum’s roof, powering a two-channel projection that converted the sun’s energy back into light. On one side of a floor-to-ceiling screen, rotating golden tree rings mingle with gentle undulations of a solar farm and a Russian biophysicist’s solar-cycle diagrams. Behind, a 10 Mexican peso coin endlessly spins the face of the Aztec sun god Tonatiuh. Mangan understands sculpture and the material object as embedded within processes that encompass circulating energy, capital, labor, and geological and weather systems. Making such flows (and our movements within them) visible is an opportunity to touch scales beyond ours, to interrogate our interdependence with others, and our complicity in legacies of extraction and colonisation.
In his 12-minute video A World Undone (2012), Mangan overlays human and deep geological time, exploding a rock sample of zircon (the oldest known terrestrial matter) into microscopic particles filmed at speed. Watching in darkness the slowed-down footage of this twinkling dust, exhibited nearby slivered like sediment between glass as A World Undone (Protolith) (2012/2024), draws us into an “inverted cosmos” pointing as much to planetary formation as it does to the violence of excavation. Elsewhere, in Termite Economies (2018–20), Mangan takes Australian scientific research from the early 2000s on termite-assisted gold detection to speculative endpoints, imagining 3D-printed insect-scale mines patterned by techniques for predicting their spread through buildings.
Limits to Growth (2016–21) continues Mangan’s fascination with aggregations of history and matter, tracing a story that interweaves Bitcoin with Rai, the ancient limestone monetary system of Micronesian island Yap. As elaborated in the video Letter to Rai (2020–21) Mangan used a second-hand crypto-mine to finance large-format photographs of these oversized stone coins. The accrued carbon debt of the ‘mine’ was later offset by salvaging and reconstituting its component parts, resulting in aluminium ingots displayed alongside a papier-maché Rai made with industrially shredded excess prints. Referencing the 1972 Club of Rome report modelling cataclysmic futures based on a liberal status quo, the work demonstrates a mode of enquiry that carefully intervenes in the construction of new assemblages.
Mangan’s newest body of work addresses the dying Great Barrier Reef as real and metaphorical figure, in a film and series of hybrid sculptural “ossuaries.” Core-Coralations (2022–23) maps a narrative from settler ships running aground on the reef to geo-engineered “supercorals” and the melancholic practice of broadcasting healthy coral sounds to remediate bleached zones. Death Assemblage (2022), a striking block of composite material on wheels is equal parts monument, obstruction, and billboard. What could be concrete or the fossilised coral remains of a limestone cave comes alive with bioluminescent pigments blooming violet-blue under intermittent UV lights, evoking both a forensic lab and fluorescing heat-stressed corals.
As many institutions and cultural producers seek to co-create a world less dependent on fossil-fuelled extractive logics, Mangan’s commitment to layered critical thinking that is material, historical, ideological, and poetic feels particularly instructive.
Photos:
1. Nicholas Mangan, Matter Over Mined (For A World Undone), 2012, C-type print, image courtesy the artist, Sutton Gallery, Australia and LABOR, Mexico © the artist.
2. Nicholas Mangan, Mined Over Matter (For A World Undone), 2012, C-type print, image courtesy the artist, Sutton Gallery, Australia and LABOR, Mexico, © the artist
