Excerpt from press release

The poetics of rubbish - text François de Coninck
 

The universal fate of all objects is to be discarded. Never before has our planet been so obsessed with discarding things. The massive deluge of objects flooding our world casts a black shadow - the oil slick of waste. Our current era, in which the market has expanded and become global, is one of objects that are not very durable and low-quality materials. They are thrown away immediately after use, decommissioned as soon as they have served their purpose. They pile up in the domestic chaos that is our modern world. They overflow from our dustbins, fill our recycling centres, and line our motorways - wounded, faded, broken objects in a state of decay. They have lost their practical value and been stripped of their exchange value - but not their beauty or symbolic value. At least not in Sara Bjarland's eyes. It is precisely those objects that no longer serve a purpose, those flimsy, spent materials, those truly empty things, that matter to her. At the edge of the rubbish dump and before they fall in, Bjarland grabs them by the neck and gives them - or what remains of them, their exterior or shell - an aesthetic purpose. By means of minimal, precisely chosen and targeted artistic interventions - darning, stacking, sometimes even casting - she grants them a reprieve and transforms useless objects, humble and damaged materials, and banal relics of our consumer society into works of art. Because things that are no longer good for anything can still be pleasing to our eyes. .......