In a room thick with memory, there is something – that is the nearest word I have for it – irradiated by late afternoon light. Before your eyes, it switches between meaning and meaninglessness, which in turn looks like a rocking horse like toy that is put on top of a shiny metal ocean of plastic wrappers, such as a car that drives to salvation, and a municipal orange wordway randomly placed in a lot of other nothing. No symbol, just proof that something destructive has happened.
The objects of Ser Serpas, which fill the Senate, set the tone and the pace for The collectorsAn exhibition of 14 international artists who act in waste and surplus, waste and surplus, in Moma PS1 – a museum in a former public school building in one of the fastest developing parts of the town and the city. It draws our attention to a rising aesthetics of construction, destruction and the palimpsests left behind by cycling between the two too quickly. It sets up human production – not as individuals, nor as small groups, as an emerging characteristic of our global collectivity – as a power of new sublimity, as powerful in contemporary art as nature for the romantics.
The most common strategy in this exhibition is to reformally reformulate the waste of capitalism. For example, the Bosnian artist Selma Selman presents an industrial nail gilded with gold extracted from motherboards demolished by the metal recycling company of her family (“Nagel”, 2025) and a building claw reused as a blossom that opens and closes with a loud, grinding sound (“flowers of life,” 2025). Klara Liden’s “Untitled (Membrane 5)” (2025) is a plate roof material that looks just like an intentional work of abstraction. Nick Relph’s Dye Sublimation Aluminum prints from the British artist consist of 1: 1 reproductions of city surfaces and signage, finding art in overlooking niches of the city.
It is the Georgian artist Tolia Astakhishvili who successfully gestures the sublimity of human overproduction and does this through a mechanics exhaustion. In Astakhishvili and David Perice’s two-channel video “So many things I would like to tell you” (2025), objects like a ground cola-tin, a spoon and a pack of pills through a scanner. These well -known objects, made creepy in this clinical context, as if from an archaeological excavation in the future, are in the beginning interesting; Then the attention flags. It is the difference between being aimed at a particularly witty piece of metro graffiti and is asked to investigate each tile in a station.
These strategies – draw attention to the formal qualities of those that we have written together in the form of overproduction, and to the impossibility of really understanding the vastness of overproduction as an individual – ensure an interesting exhibition, but I am not convinced that it is enough to maintain an artistic movement. Even in this context, certain strategies started to feel repetitive or thin in the beginning, such as video art as a tool to express deep time. Somewhat counter -Intuïtive, it is a work in possibly the most primitive media here – painting – that felt one of the most effective. Samuel Hindolo’s “Gare de Bruxelles-Nord” (2024) is the chirico-like in his almost hieroglyphic compositional brightness. In his crazy combination of well -known elements – Sphinx, stairs, air – it destabilizes in ways impossible and familiar.
plywood
The collectors will take place in Moma PS1 (22-25 Jackson Avenue, Queens, New York) until October 6. The exhibition was compiled by Ruba Katrib with Sheldon Gooch and Serena Moscardelli.
