beyond the depths, 2024, site-specific four-channel video installation (Screen 1: dark matter, 19’52”, Screen 2: dark matter, extended montage, 71’19”, Screen 3: the cavity on the inside, 71’19”, Screen 4: the shadows beneath, 71’19”), 4K video, color, sound, trapezoidal sheet metal, LED worklights

beyond the depths is a site-specific installation that brings three worked grounds into one room. A crater in eastern Siberia, 525 metres deep, cut down along the rock that once carried diamonds up from the mantle. The copper region of Mansfeld under the southern Harz, worked for eight hundred years, its heaps still oxidising in the open air. The lignite pits west of Cologne, where the water has to be drawn out from under whole districts before the coal can be reached. The room at M HKA is lined with the ribbed steel of factory walls and lit by worklights, so that the way in is a way down.

Nav Haq, associate director at M HKA since 2019, written for the exhibition Beyond the Depths, Antwerp, 2024.

Viktor Brim is an artist who portrays the relationship between power and the exploitation of the natural landscape. Working typically in film and video, his highly immersive installations of luminous imagery explore sites of extraction, both historical and contemporary.

Geological time is a central notion, with which Brim considers the lives of minerals and matter over imperceptibly long lengths of time, stretching from far back in the past, until their brutal encounter with humanity, and then extending more speculatively into the future. Stillness in his films simultaneously represents a wound and latent energy. Drawing our attention to the life of minerals (from the ‘precious’ to pollutant, and that are the lifeblood of modern societies and economies), his film works are also philosophical meditations at their core. Natural resources are viewed at once as being on the one hand exploited in the service of domineering ideologies, and on the other, living an extraordinary existence of the own.

Brim’s solo exhibition at M HKA titled Beyond the Depths brings together a recent and an experimental new project.

Central here is his video installation Dark Matter (2020), which takes us to the vast Mir diamond mine in the city of Mirny in Sakha (formerly Yakutia), a republic in Russia’s Far East region of Siberia. Through a series of minimal tableaus, we observe this resource-rich landscape that stretches back to the period of Joseph Stalin when diamond mining was a lifeblood of the Soviet Union. Filmed during the special light of the ‘blue hour’ in this Arctic region, industrial machinery can be seen from a distance in the dystopic landscape that winds down into a colossal void in the ground, demonstrating how human agency, in the cause of ideology, inscribes itself onto the landscape. Dark Matter reflects on an extractive economy that Antwerp is world-famous for, whilst making a contemporary connection to geopolitics with the unavoidable backdrop of Russia’s catastrophic war on Ukraine.

A new three-screen installation is a choreography of imagery from three projects that continue Brim’s investigation of geology, time, economics and politics. Using filmed imagery from Mirny, Murmansk (both Russian Federation), Mansfeld and Rheinisches Braunkohlerevier (both Germany) respectively, it takes us from recent human history towards a place in which the deep geological time of natural metallurgic processes for rocks and slag debris is accelerated to portray them as energised and in a state of flux.

The two installations that comprise this exhibition are also presented within an ambitious architectural structure designed by Brim, produced using trapezoidal metal sheet, typically used in industry, evocative of industrial mineshafts.

Depth is one of the oldest metaphors in European culture. The word has long stood for truth, origin and ground, for whatever lies hidden under a surface, and the movement downward has been imagined as a way to bring knowledge back, the descent into the underworld that returns with something it did not have before (Kimmich and Müller 2020). The same history holds a second depth, secular and workable. From the early modern period the inside of the earth stopped being untouchable and became a place to measure, enter and mine, the invisible turned into something not yet seen, something to be made visible (Kimmich and Müller 2020). Every ground in this exhibition was opened under that second idea, not for knowledge but for material. And each opening reached further than its pit: it decided where towns were built and which villages disappeared, what generations of families did for a living, and what states could plan with. The room in Antwerp is built as a shaft, lined with the ribbed steel used to clad industrial halls, so that the visitor stands under the surface instead of in front of it.

Diamonds are carbon, pressed at depths of some 150 kilometres into the hardest material found in nature, and brought within reach only where volcanic pipes once carried them upward; a diamond mine is a hole cut along such an accident. Their value has almost no weight. A fortune fits into a coat pocket and crosses any border, which is why states have treated the stones as an instrument: the Soviet Union opened its Siberian fields in the 1950s for the industrial diamonds its drills and grinding wheels needed, then for hard currency, and built towns onto permafrost to hold the workforce (Crate 2002). The stone itself keeps no record of any of this. A cut diamond shows nothing of its pit, its labour or its politics, so origin has always been a matter of trust and paper. Since 1 January 2024 the European Union bans the import of Russian diamonds, part of a G7 measure against a revenue stream for Russia’s war on Ukraine, put at some 4 billion euros a year (Council of the EU 2023). The exhibition opened in Antwerp, city of the diamond trade, three weeks later.

Copper is the metal electricity runs on. It was among the first metals people learned to work, and since the wiring of the world every cable, coil, generator and motor has depended on it; a society that electrifies is a society that needs copper, invisibly and everywhere. In the Mansfeld region under the southern Harz it was taken for some eight hundred years, from around 1200 until 1990, out of a black shale seam seldom thicker than a hand’s breadth. That thinness set the scale of everything above: to win a little metal, enormous masses of rock had to be moved, and the conical heaps of it still stand over the villages like a built mountain range. The seam decided where towns grew and what generations of the same families did underground. In the GDR the district ran as a state combine, copper being one of the few strategic metals the country had of its own, and the last shaft closed on 30 September 1990, three days before the state it had supplied ceased to exist. The metal went into walls, machines and cables and works there unseen. What stays visible is everything that was moved to reach it.

Lignite is the youngest of the coals, brown, soft and half water, with so little energy in a tonne that carrying it far makes no sense. It is burned where it is dug, in power stations beside the pits, and it can only be dug from the surface, so this fuel consumes land: not a shaft into the ground but the ground itself, square kilometre by square kilometre. In the Rhenish district west of Cologne the pits of Garzweiler, Hambach and Inden feed the plants around them, and Germany remains the largest lignite producer in the European Union, some 92 million tonnes in 2024, close to half the EU total (Statistisches Bundesamt). Since the 1950s about 130 villages and hamlets in the district have been cleared and more than 40,000 people moved for the pits (BUND NRW), their places rebuilt elsewhere under old names. To keep the pits dry, groundwater is pumped away and the land above sinks by metres. Mining here ends in 2030, set by law, and the holes will outlast their purpose: which villages fell and which remained was decided by state resolutions, the last in September 2023.

beyond the depths was a solo exhibition made for In Situ at M HKA, the programme through which the museum invites artists from around the world to create new work in the Point Room, its most atypical space (M HKA). In Situ presentations are conceived for that room rather than adapted to it, and here the steel architecture framed the whole space instead of a single wall. The exhibition ran from 20 January to 5 May 2024, curated by Nav Haq, with the support of ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen). Sound design and ambisonics by Johanna Schütt.