This may not be the first or last study in the face of our economic model and the failure of deepening environmental emergencies, but rather the “Collector” ended on MOMA PS1 on October 6, providing a distinctly regenerated and refreshing alternative view. Rather than drowning in doom or aestheticized nihilism, the show establishes a clear argument for the artist’s ability to creatively cope with the climate crisis and the despair that saturates today’s seemingly post-apocalyptic landscape.
In “Collector”, the artist resists collapse, highlighting imaginative efforts to collect, collect, restore and reuse the debris and remnants left by capitalist Decay. In the form of Ser serpas, its ridiculous combination creates surprising material juxtapositions-masked urban objects reconceived as poetic meditations of the fragile and transient nature of existence. Her installation originates from the neglected edge of urban life, evoking the temporary status of urban waste, turning rejection into a trace of error in a world within a world.
tolia astakhishvili further promotes Evil planan uneasy tragic experience that disturbs the space and the audience. By converting the room into a walk-in cooler, she paused traces of life in the frozen state of posthumanity-as if the remnants of outdated snow or the remnants of an imminent climate catastrophe had disappeared from all possibilities of expression or connection. Sketches, graffiti and fragmented photographs have caused vulnerability to individuals who work to form meaningful relationships, reflecting how memory, family and socio-political structures are embedded and distorted by the built environment.
Similar dynamics are expanded Dark days (2025), Astakhishvili reconfigured urban canvas: a scattered mixture spread over dusty concrete floors in an unfinished industrial space. Here, urban debris becomes a contemporary archaeological site, engraving collective history and production cycles on the material of daily life. Swedish artist Klara Lidén also captures this vernacular poetry in her quiet study of Berlin’s ubiquitous junction boxes, thereby tracking how they are covered by human traces, the informal, informal narrative accumulated on the skin of the ruthless development and the decline of the city.
It is worth noting that several of these artists are from Eastern Europe, carrying the remains of life from historical rupture, post-socialist transition and systematic disintegration, which allows them to critically ask about the “post”, post-industrial, post-communist, post-communist or post-human “post-post”.
Among them, Bosnian artist Selma Selman stands out to make the inherited scrap metal (usually derived from the family’s metalworking exercises), a dream animal that refuses to be discarded. In Selman’s hands, electronic garbage becomes an animation folklore: the ridiculous mechanical creatures ignore the logic of the plan’s outdated and delay it to a system that tilts objects and people. The result is a subversive counternarrative – an agent that claims to be made from what remains through improvisation, invention and radical behavior.
Similarly, miho dohi reuses the discovery of the material into a composite combination rich in fixed forms, but rather suggests a state of permanent manipulation and reconfiguration. Her works linger in the boundary space, whether it is a sculpture or an object, but a tactile language of sustained potential. The Korean artist Geumhyung Jeong builds on this impulse to conduct a meticulous and almost surgical reconsideration of form and function. Due to clinical obsession, she removed the toys, robots and medical devices and simply recombined them into pieces, incredible constellations – part prosthesis, part performance relics. In her hands, reconstruction becomes a creepy recovery that rewrites the meaning of use, purpose and control.
The source of tangled goods for circular goods is the center stage of Karimah Ashadu Brown productsThis is a videotape that traces the epic life of Nigerian immigrant Emeka, who built a new existence in the ruins of Hamburg and became a second-hand commodity trader. His story becomes a lens, the flow of global labor and waste – bound to the dynamics of colonial power – exposed. This logic of extraction can also be found in the work of Jean Katambayi Mukendi, whose practice centers on Lubumbashi, the hometown of Lubumbashi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. his Trash TVa pieced together an inappropriate device, is both a rescue electronic device that can serve as a time capsule and a witness of silence. The piece immediately static and electric illustrates the forgotten lineage of garbage as an inevitable extract: a broken receiver, nothing is passed, and everything is trapped in the current of a tired system.
Chinese artists use restricted dictionary of natural materials to address the instability of destructive acceleration of modernization and industrialization. In the sculpture installation constructed from stone, he engages in an unstable act of balance, an effort to symbolically restore the organic laws and rhythms eroded by the unexamined development system. In Zhou Tao’s video, a similar unbalanced surface brings viewers to a large number of data centers embedded in the mountainous wilderness of Jizhou, China. Through layered images and rhythms, work weaves together the discord speeds of two coexisting worlds: the tightly controlled indoor life of technicians and data workers, and the slower agricultural rhythms of local farmers and the surrounding natural landscape. The result is a quiet and sharp juxtaposition – a digital infrastructure opposite to ecological continuity – high showing an enlarged crack between human and natural systems.
In the “Collector,” this potential tension between technological expansion and human vulnerability emerges as several works explore the opaque control architecture that now controls everyday life. Data flow, monitoring grids and algorithmic governance – These invisible frameworks not only regulate the cycle of goods, but also define the outline of ideas, behaviors and even collective destiny.
The haunting video of Emilijaškarnulytė funeral Faced with the catastrophic potential of technological intake, reflect on the legacy of nuclear power. A snake is entangled through the exposed mechanism of the Ignalina nuclear power plant near the Belarusian border, creating an inherent tension between the accuracy of the engineering system and the unruly persistence of natural life. This work evokes potential fluctuations in man-made disasters and their uncontrollable consequences. From 1983 to 1999, Ignalina’s activities, commonly known as the sister plant of Chernobyl, shared Soviet-era design flaws that led to the collapse of 1986.
Although the site was retired in the early 2000s, the site still houses countless radioactive wastes: silent, inert, but deep threats, they remain an unresolved consequence of technological ambitions and an ongoing risk of another nuclear disaster. Today, this risk is less and more involved in the integrity of data systems, digital monitoring protocols, algorithmic security checks and centralized control infrastructures that are largely invisible to the public. In this sense, this seductive and disturbing video prompts us to consider not only the heavy material residues of nuclear history, but also the invisible and unstable frameworks that now control our collective security.
In a global environment, these artists (capturers of remnants of corrupt civilizations) appear as the shirk of hope, revealing how the imaginative human mind catalyzes reflection, envisions alternative systems and builds meaning in the consumption cycle, and constitutes our political and social realities in the endless consumption cycle. This innate resilience of the human spirit reflects the enduring power of nature itself, emphasizing the deep interconnection of these forces.
To demonstrate the geopolitical and economic impact of a generation coping with the failure model and ideology, these artists actively reimagined and redefined various forms within complex networks (in the reproductive structure of a mobile, evolving global Urban environment) that would bring together collective and individual memory, various forms of labor and individual and shared agents.
Although several works have a doomsday or posthuman background, the exhibition never completely succumbs to despair. Instead, it signaled toward the ruthless reshaping ability of humanity (the quiet, lasting endurance of nature), even in a world where waste accumulates shadows of extremism, war and environmental collapse.
The “collector” was observed from MOMA PS1 to October 6.
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