“. . . humanity’s fraught relationship with the natural world.”
Its title “is taken from a key work in the exhibition,” curators Anneke Jaspers and Anna Davis tell me about A World Undone, a survey of Melbourne artist Nicholas Mangan works across two decades. The work in question, dated 2012, “focuses on the mineral zircon, the oldest known mineral on Earth dated to approximately 4.4 billion years. Mangan filmed a crushed-up specimen of zircon rock dispersing through air to evoke an image of the world coming apart. It speaks to many of the ideas explored in the show, related to geology, extractive economies, and deep time – and to Mangan’s practice as a whole, which at a fundamental level considers humanity’s fraught relationship with the natural world. It also calls attention to a sculptural process of undoing materials that is central to Mangan’s work.”
L–R: Nicholas Mangan, Termite Economies: Phase 1 (detail), 2018; Proposition for Dowiyogo’s Ancient Coral Coffee Table, 2009; and Progress in Action, 2013. Full image details below
The exhibition presents eight major Mangan works in all and marks the artist’s first comprehensive survey in a public institution. It is born of a long association between Mangan and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA). “He exhibited in Primavera in 2004 and the museum subsequently acquired four of his works – most recently A World Undone, which is jointly owned with Tate, London,” the curators explain. “The exhibition grew out of an active curatorial dialogue sustained over the better part of a decade, which has provided a solid foundation for shaping the show together. The list of works was finessed over of a number of site visits in parallel with the floorplan – and also in dialogue with architect Ying-Lan Dann, who worked with us to refine how the projects are sequenced and spatialised.”
Nicholas Mangan, Limits to Growth (Part 3) – Letter to Rai (detail), 2020–21, installation view, ‘Nicholas Mangan: A World Undone’, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2024, steel server rack, reconstituted aluminium and cables from Bitcoin mining machines, archival pigment print with aluminium frame, papier mâché sculpture made from 149 shredded photographs. © the artist. Photograph: Hamish McIntosh. Courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne
Key to the exhibition is a journey along a central axis, visitors weaving in and out. It’s an immersive journey the curators take me on: “The opening installation evokes a Pacific archipelago and foregrounds Nick’s focus on material transformation, in this case by way of ‘coffee tables’ fashioned from coral limestone. Further along, the sources of energy that are powering (or have powered) different works come into view – including a battery banking solar energy from a solar array on the MCA’s roof and a generator powered by coconut biofuel. There’s also the remnants of a Bitcoin mining rig and a video of an endlessly spinning coin, which foreground notions of currency, value, exchange and economies.”
Each of Mangan’s eight major works are presented as a “self-contained universe,” the rationale being that visitors gain a unique opportunity to experience the scope and layered narratives embedded in each project – research-based works that are often developed iteratively over long periods. A work like Termite Economies, 2018–20, captures this; evoking non-human labour and social organisation, here “sculptures and video elements from three different phases of the project are brought together as a single installation for the first time.”
L–R: Nicholas Mangan, Death Assemblage, 2022; Core-Coralations (still), 2022–23; and Nicholas Mangan, Mined Over Matter (For A World Undone), 2012. Full image details below
When asked what aspects of Mangan’s oeuvre hold ground today, Jaspers and Davis say many facets “feel relevant” to the current moment: “his focus on Australia’s place in the region; the way he thinks across eras and disciplines; and his engagement with current affairs, from the rise of generative AI to warming sea temperatures.” And I would have to agree; struck specially by the artist’s own view of his practice as a form of “material storytelling,” where the material in question becomes an active collaborator in the narratives he seeks to unfold. By weaving through Mangan’s works, we become collaborators, too, seeing something of our own deep implication in its stories. Mangan’s latest project – Core-Coralations, 2021–ongoing – about the challenges facing our Great Barrier Reef sails close to my own lived narratives and material stories in my beach suburb on the Coral Sea, for instance.
A World Undone brings into clarity and immersive relation what the curators call “an incredibly agile, expansive practice” – one that resonates in complex ways with our own doing and undoing of the world, natural or otherwise.
Dr Joseph Brennan is a Lambda Literary Award-nominated author based in Tropical North Queensland.
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
5 April to 30 June 2024
Sydney
Full image details:
Nicholas Mangan, Termite Economies: Phase 1 (detail), 2018, 3D printed plaster, dirt, synthetic polymer paint, steel, plywood, custom lighting, Sony Trinitron monitors; video 1: single-channel digital video, colour, silent; video 2: single-channel digital video, colour, silent, 03:28 minutes; video 3: two-channel digital video, colour, silent, 02:44 minutes, four-channel surround sound of termite warning signals. Buxton International Collection, purchased 2018. © the artist. Photograph: Andrew Curtis. Courtesy the artist, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney
Nicholas Mangan, Proposition for Dowiyogo’s Ancient Coral Coffee Table, 2009, installation view, Nicholas Mangan: A World Undone, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2024, coral limestone from the island of Nauru, wooden travel crate. © the artist. Photograph: Hamish McIntosh. Courtesy the artist, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney
Nicholas Mangan, Progress in Action, 2013, installation view, Nicholas Mangan: A World Undone, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2024, modified diesel generator, coconuts, coconut oil, steel, flywire, rope, 44 gallon drums, steel jerry cans, tarpaulin, acid-etched copper sheet, cables, copper pipe, exhaust pipe, hessian, oriented strand board; single-channel digital video, standard definition. Monash University Collection, purchased 2016–17. © the artist. Photograph: Hamish McIntosh. Courtesy the artist and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney
Nicholas Mangan, Death Assemblage, 2022, installation view, Nicholas Mangan: A World Undone, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2024, coral, aragonite, mineral powder, acrylic resin, bioluminescent pigment, ultraviolet light, fibreglass-reinforced plastic grating, mild steel, enamel paint. © the artist. Photograph: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy the artist, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney
Nicholas Mangan, Core-Coralations (still), 2022–23, single-channel digital video, high definition, colour, sound. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne
Nicholas Mangan, Mined Over Matter (For A World Undone), 2012, C-type print. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne and LABOR, Mexico
