Viktor Brim — Beyond the Depths

+++ This exhibition ran from 20 January to 5 May 2024. +++

Artist Viktor Brim explores the relationship between power and the extraction of natural landscapes. Working primarily with film, his immersive video installations delve into both historical and contemporary sites of extraction.

A key concept in Brim’s practice is geological time. He contemplates the life of minerals and matter across vast temporal scales. The silence in his films evokes both a wound and a latent energy. By focusing our attention on the life cycle of minerals – from ‘precious’ to polluting, and central to modern economies and societies – his films become philosophical meditations. Natural resources are extracted in service of dominant ideologies, while simultaneously maintaining an extraordinary existence of their own.

Beyond the Depths

Brim’s solo exhibition at Muhka, titled Beyond the Depths, brought together recent work and an experimental new project.

At its core was his video installation Dark Matter (2020), which transported viewers to the vast Mir diamond mine in the city of Mirny, in the Sakha Republic in the Russian Far East. The imagery reveals a landscape rich in raw materials. Captured during the Arctic region’s “blue hour,” industrial machinery is seen from afar within a dystopian terrain spiraling down into a colossal void. It depicts how human actions, driven by ideology, literally and metaphorically inscribe themselves into the land. Dark Matter reflects on an industry for which Antwerp is world-renowned and draws connections to geopolitics and the war in Ukraine.

A new three-channel installation presented a choreography of images from three projects that continued Brim’s investigations into geology, time, economy, and politics. Featuring footage from Mirny and Murmansk (Russian Federation), Mansfeld and the Rhenish lignite mining region (Germany), the work moved from recent human history to deep geological time, accelerating natural metallurgic processes in rock and slag to depict them as energetic and in constant transformation.

Brim brought these two installations together in an impressive architectural structure made of trapezoidal metal sheets commonly used in industry, reminiscent of industrial mining shafts.

Sound design and ambisonics mix by Johanna Schütt.

About Viktor Brim

Born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Viktor Brim lives and works in Cologne, Germany. He studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM) from 2015 to 2019.

His solo and group exhibitions include: My Precious, Werkleitz Festival (2023); Surreal Futures, Max Ernst Museum Brühl (2023); Dark Matter, KIRIK, Istanbul (2022); Precious Strata, La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2021); Videonale 18, Kunstmuseum Bonn (2021); and Possessed Landscapes, Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art, Oldenburg (2020).

Beyond the Depths was his first solo museum exhibition and his first major presentation outside Germany.

This exhibition was made possible with the support of the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen.