Labour Lung
With Nasrin Tabatabai & Babak Afrassiabi
A Landmass to Come
With Katrin Hornek
Discussion led by Margarida Mendes

Taking a cue from the more emergent properties of the Anthropocene, these two artist talks focus on making durational processes of accumulation sensible. For The Shape of a Practice, Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi present their work Labour Lung, which uses a generative audio piece to depict the deleterious effects of smoking opium on the lungs and tell a story about how the corporeal effects of opium relate to colonialist and capitalist extraction.

Artist Katrin Hornek discusses her work A Landmass to Come, which employs literal earth to convey a speculative tale of the Latvian geological landscape and the industries that flourished thanks to it. Hornek also presents a guided audio journey, which can be followed via the archived stream. For this, the artist recommends using headphones, making yourself comfortable and, if possible, preparing a piece of hand-sized clay. If you don’t have clay at hand, it helps to use some other formable material that you can imagine is clay, like a cloth.

The talks conclude with a discussion led by artist and researcher Margarida Mendes.