Haegue Yang participates in Planet B: Climate Change & the New Sublime. Its third act, The tragic death of Nauru Island, tells the story of extractivism, pollution and extinction —the hypothesis of a catastrophic sublime.
It is steeped in the history of the island of Nauru, located in Micronesia in the Pacific Ocean. In the 1970s, this tiny independent island became the world’s wealthiest country per capita because of its huge phosphate deposits. Today, the impoverished state is nothing but a spent, desolate, sterile landscape. Its story can be seen as the parable of extractivism gone mad, but also as the image of the negative sublime of pollution, the exhaustion of natural resources, and mass extinctions. It also sheds light on why contemporary artists now scrutinise the planet with a molecular eye, focusing on chemistry and organic compounds.
