Descending into the KIT exhibition and traversing the long, sloping space with its striking, elliptical concrete architecture calls for an active perception of time. This is already evident at the beginning of the exhibition route with the almost 20-minute 4K video Dark Matter and the artist’s book Imperial Objects (both 2020) by Viktor Brim shown on a display. On a free-standing projection screen in Cinemascope format, a foggy, post-apocalyptic landscape gradually becomes visible with continuous drone sound, and the camera sets off in search of traces of the machines and equipment of precarious wage labor in a diamond and gold mine in Yakutia and into the maelstrom of its crater. As the title succinctly suggests and the artist’s book illuminates in texts with background information, materials such as newspaper articles, postcards and images of the area, the work in the Mir diamond mine around the city of Mirnij is also a dark, dangerous and secret affair. It is protected by the local company Alrosa, but also by the regional government on site and in Moscow. This is because the mining was partly carried out with a nuclear bomb test initiated by the Russian government in Yakutia in 1993. Radioactive material, as well as traces of the heavy metal industry and parts of rockets have turned the area into a toxic landscape. The artist’s book summarizes the topography, history, present and narratives surrounding the mine in several chapters, which are also separated by colour, and provides information about the work and power cycles as well as the surroundings. Reports from the locals on site about explosions, toxic substances, dying animals, devastated nature and supernatural phenomena, a „higher authority“, thus become a polyphonic and lively narrative. During his several-month stay in Mirnij, Viktor Brim collected material about the mining town and life there, as well as focusing on conversations with a worker and on internet forums in which secret information about the experiments taking place there was also discussed. The slow scanning of this barren, enigmatic and gloomy landscape with the camera at the Mir mine, which only shows the machines working the edges of the crater, makes the destruction and danger of the surroundings latently tangible. The artist’s book, on the other hand, reveals the traces and experiences of the people on site; it lends the film images their own depth through the narrative threads of the material.

Lilian Haberer – KIT – Kunst im Tunnel