Pi Artworks Gallery, London, UK

3 August to 30 September, 2016

 

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This exhibition confronts the accelerating cadence of environmental collapse and asks a  question: after centuries of ecocide, how do humans and the things we make adapt to forces that exceed our control? Through video, collage, painting,  sculpture, installation and a lecture performance, the project gathers a chorus of artists who treat the gallery as a site of rehearsal for survival, repair and renewed responsibility.

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We present a pan-global reading of the Anthropocene, understood here as a name for the entanglement of human activity with planetary systems. The works interrogate gender and capital, ecological cascades and identity, automation and materiality, and the fraught prospect of nature’s return after crisis. The exhibition privileges sensation and thought in equal measure. Each work advances a proposition for how culture might act within damaged landscapes rather than merely describe them.

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Huber & Huber unleash a bubble machine that spits black pigment across a white floor, a vivid theatre of chance and control that asks whether technology disciplines imagination or sets it free. Mark Salvatus couples a rapid montage of world currencies with the patient flow of pedestrians on a Manila overpass, exposing how abstract value and everyday movement interlock. Victoria Sin stages a forest of monumental plastic banana balloons, inflated at the threshold of the gallery, to expose the logics of extractive capitalism that convert living systems into spectacle and surplus.

 

Rachel McCrae gathers driftwood, dust, broken cups and speculative Roman fragments from the Thames and animates them as provisional sculptures, turning riverine residue into a study of ecological chain reactions. Omer Even-Paz coaxes cows, rabbits and sparrows from sheets of foil, assembling mismatched parts into tender, provisional creatures that breathe against the grain of their own construction.

 

Manuel Mathieu’s paintings fold abstraction into scenes of political tension shaped by the scramble for resources, insisting that environmental conflict is always social and historical. Alex Ankina’s lecture performance threads these inquiries together, testing how language, evidence and embodiment can share a single stage.

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Together these works reject a simple picture of nature as something separate from us. They remake images, appropriate materials, and sometimes destroy what they begin, in order to show how consumption creates as much as it erodes and how creation can become a form of critique. At the heart of the exhibition lies a claim: naming the Anthropocene is not an end point. It is an ethical summons to invent new methods and new forms of life in common.

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The exhibition is not a spectacle of defeat. It acknowledges rage and exhaustion, the honest weather of our moment, and then routes those feelings into method of active hope. The artists operate from inside the conditions they examine. They do not claim a neutral vantage. Instead they model forms of attention, collaboration and care that remain workable within storm and strain. What binds these works is not resignation but discipline, a refusal to turn away, and a commitment to make meaning where systems fray.

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Will Nature Make a Man of Me Yet? proposes the gallery as a civic instrument. It convenes artworks as tools for thinking and feeling our way through environmental breakdown while sketching the contours of another order of relation. If there is a lesson here, it is that culture can still widen the field of the possible. Not by promising rescue, but by practising lucidity, tenderness and invention. By the time you leave, the question in the title may have shifted. It is less about what nature will make of us, and more about what we will make with nature, together, now.

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Artists: Alex Anikina, Rachel McRae, Omer Even-Paz, Huber.Huber, Mark Salvatus, Manuel Mathieu, Victoria Sin