MoMA PS1’s ‘The Gatherers’ Rejects Climate Catastrophism in Favor of Resilient Resourcefulness

<img decoding="async" class="wp-image-1557715 size-full-width" src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/06/PS1_042325_20-2000×1429-1.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="Installation view of a room clad in drywall panels with fire extinguishers arranged beside a recessed white pit." width="970" height="693" data-caption='Tolia Astakhishvili, <em>Wicked Plans,</em> 2025. Mixed-media installation with works by Maka Sanadze and Zurab Astakhishvili. <span class=”media-credit”>Courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Kris Graves</span>’>

It may not be the first—or the last—exhibition to confront the failures of our economic model and deepening environmental emergency, but “The Gatherers,” closing on October 6 at MoMA PS1, offers a distinctly regenerative and refreshingly alternative perspective. Instead of sinking into doom or aestheticized nihilism, the show constructs a clear and purposeful argument for the artist’s capacity to respond creatively to the climate crisis and the despair that saturates today’s seemingly post-apocalyptic landscape.

Resisting collapse into hopelessness, the artists in “The Gatherers” emphasize an imaginative effort to gather, collect, restore and repurpose the detritus and remnants left behind by capitalist decay. Take Ser Serpas, whose absurdist assemblages create surprising material juxtapositions—discarded urban objects reimagined as poetic meditations on the fragile and fleeting nature of existence. Sourced from the overlooked edges of city life, her installations evoke the provisional status of urban waste, transforming refuse into errant traces of a world in flux.

Tolia Astakhishvili pushes this further in Wicked Plan, an embodied experience of tragedy that unsettles both space and viewer. By converting a room into a walk-in cooler, she suspends traces of life in a frozen, post-human stillness—as if the snow of obsolescence, or the residue of an impending climate catastrophe, had already extinguished all possibility of expression or connection. Sketches, doodles and fragmentary photographs evoke the fragility of individuals struggling to form meaningful relationships, reflecting how memory, family and socio-political structures are embedded in—and distorted by—built environments.

A similar dynamic unfolds in dark days (2025), where Astakhishvili reconfigures the urban canvas: a scattered mix of objects laid out across a dusty concrete floor in an unfinished industrial space. Here, urban detritus becomes a kind of contemporary archaeological site, inscribing collective histories and cycles of production into the very material cast-offs of daily life. Swedish artist Klara Lidén, too, captures this vernacular poetry in her quiet study of Berlin’s ubiquitous junction boxes, tracing how they become covered with human marks—fleeting, unofficial narratives accumulating on the skin of the city’s relentless development and urban decay.

Notably, several of these artists hail from Eastern Europe, carrying with them the lived residue of historical rupture, post-socialist transition and systemic disintegration—a position that allows them to critically interrogate the elusive and ever-shifting condition of the “post,” whether post-industrial, post-communist or post-human.

Among them, Bosnian artist Selma Selman stands out for reanimating inherited scrap metal—often sourced from her family’s metalworking practice—into fantastical motorized creatures that reject being discard. In Selman’s hands, e-waste becomes animated folklore: absurd, mechanical beings that defy the logic of planned obsolescence and push back against a system that renders both objects and people disposable. The result is a subversively playful counter-narrative—one that asserts agency through improvisation, invention and the radical act of making something from what was meant to be left behind.

Similarly, Miho Dohi repurposes found materials into ingeniously compounded assemblages that resist fixed form, instead suggesting a state of perpetual manipulation and reconfiguration. Her works hover in a liminal space—neither sculpture nor object, but a tactile language of ongoing potential. Korean artist Geumhyung Jeong builds on this impulse, staging a meticulous and almost surgical reconsideration of form and function. With clinical obsession, she disassembles toys, robotics and medical devices, only to recompose them into fragmentary, uncanny constellations—part prosthetic, part performance relic. In her hands, reconstruction becomes an eerie kind of restoration, one that rewrites the meaning of use, purpose and control.

The tangled afterlives of circulating commodities take center stage in Karimah Ashadu’s Brown Goods, a video that traces the epic life of Emeka, a Nigerian migrant who builds a new existence as a secondhand goods trader in a Hamburg scrapyard. His story becomes a lens through which global flows of labor and waste—still tethered to colonial power dynamics—are laid bare. This extractive logic can also be found in the work of Jean Katambayi Mukendi, whose practice centers on mining and industrial exploitation in his hometown of Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo. His Trash TV, an anachronistic device cobbled together from salvaged electronics, functions as both a time capsule and a silent witness. At once static and electric, the piece speaks to the forgotten lineage of garbage as the inevitable counterpart to extraction: a broken receiver, transmitting nothing and everything, caught in the current of an exhausted system.

Chinese artist He Xiangyu addresses the destabilizing effects of disruptively accelerated modernization and industrialization through a restrained lexicon of natural materials. In a sculptural installation built from stones, he stages a precarious balancing act—an effort to symbolically restore the organic laws and rhythms that have been systematically eroded by unchecked development. A similar sense of imbalance surfaces in Zhou Tao’s video, which transports viewers to a massive data center embedded in the mountainous wilderness of China’s Guizhou region. Through layered imagery and pacing, the work weaves together the dissonant tempos of two coexisting worlds: the tightly controlled interior lives of technicians and data workers and the slower agrarian rhythms of local farmers and the surrounding natural landscape. The result is a quiet yet incisive juxtaposition—digital infrastructure set against ecological continuity—highlighting the widening rift between human systems and natural ones.

This underlying tension between technological expansion and human vulnerability recurs throughout “The Gatherers”, as several works probe the opaque architectures of control that now govern daily life. Data flows, surveillance grids and algorithmic governance—these invisible frameworks regulate not only the circulation of goods but the contours of thought, behavior and even collective destiny.

Emilija Škarnulytė’s hauntingly seductive video Burial confronts the catastrophic potential of technological ingestion by reflecting on the legacy of nuclear power. A snake winds its way through the exposed mechanisms of the now-decommissioned Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania, near the Belarusian border, setting up a visceral tension between the precision of engineered systems and the unruly persistence of natural life. The work evokes the latent volatility of man-made disasters and their uncontrollable aftermath. Active from 1983 to 1999, Ignalina is often referred to as Chernobyl’s sister plant, sharing the same Soviet-era design flaws that led to the 1986 meltdown.

Though decommissioned in the early 2000s, the site still houses countless barrels of radioactive waste: mute, inert yet profoundly threatening, they remain as uneasy monuments to the unresolved consequences of technological ambition and the ongoing risk of another nuclear catastrophe. A risk that today hinges less on mechanical failure and more on the integrity of data systems, digital monitoring protocols, algorithmic safety checks and centralized control infrastructures that remain largely invisible to the public. In this sense, this seductive yet unsettling video prompts us to consider not only the heavy material remnants of nuclear history, but also the intangible and precarious frameworks that now govern our collective safety.

Across global contexts, these artists—gatherers of the residues of a corrupted civilization—offer glimmers of hope, revealing how the imaginative force of the human mind can catalyze reflection, envision alternative systems and construct meaning within the endless cycles of consumption and disposal that shape our political and social realities. This innate resilience of the human spirit is mirrored by the enduring power of nature itself, underscoring the deep interconnectedness of these forces.

As a testament to a generation grappling with the geopolitical and economic fallout of failed models and fading ideologies, these artists actively reimagine and redefine the intricate networks of relationships that bind collective and individual memory, diverse forms of labor and personal and shared agency—all within the shifting, ever-evolving fabric of sprawling global urban environments.

Though several works carry apocalyptic or posthuman undertones, the exhibition never fully succumbs to despair. Instead, it gestures toward humanity’s relentless capacity for reinvention—and nature’s quiet, persistent endurance—even in a world where waste accumulates in the shadow of extremism, war and environmental collapse.

“The Gatherers” is on view at MoMA PS1 through October 6. 

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