Exhibitions by New Mineral Collective and Dana Kavelina

From March 14 to May 4, Salzburger Kunstverein proudly presents two new exhibitions that inaugurate the institution’s 2025 Program Picturing Justice.

New Mineral Collective: Surveying Desire
Grand Hall

New Mineral Collective (Emilija Škarnulytė & Tanya Busse) delves into the complexities of landscape politics, focusing on the connections between nature and the catastrophic histories that have shaped it. Drawing on the concept of geopoetry as a method of connecting the smallest entities with the largest, and the swiftest temporal events in Earth history with the expanse of geological time, the collective prompts a reconsideration of our ethical stance towards the planet.

The exhibition features an array of new sculptural works, including six-meter-long acupuncture needles that vertically pierce the institution's space, and large, colorful bath bombs designed for rivers. These pieces act as both metaphorical and literal tools that intervene in the Earth's geophysical and geopolitical narratives. Further works act as speculative instruments of critique against contemporary capitalist exploits, revealing the scars of extraction and highlighting our planet's vulnerabilities.

Surveying Desire serves as a call to re-direct our capitalism-driven desires and adjust the scales at which we view the world. This new body of work emerges against the backdrop of environmental and geopolitical crises, offering inspiration for new planetary narratives and developing tools that connect the microcosm of the body to the macrocosm of the earth.

Opening: March 14, 2025, 8pm. Followed by a performance of Surveying Desire and Counter-Prospects at 9pm. 

Surveying Desire is commissioned and produced by Salzburger Kunstverein. The exhibition is financially supported by Office for Contemporary Art (OCA) Norway.  Presented in conjunction with the exhibition The Pleasure Report at Mercer Union in Toronto. 


Dana Kavelina: Just Landscape
Studio

Dana Kavelina’s exhibition presents her latest film that intertwines history and recurrence, as if time itself was caught in an endless rhyme. At the heart of the film is a Yiddish song about hunger that was written and sung during World War I in Poland. The song uses the metaphor of the wind as a force of destruction—blowing away rooftops, birds, crops, and trees, leaving behind a landscape of desolation. Reappearing during the Holocaust, it gained new significance as an expression of suffering and loss, an echo of a catastrophe unfolding again. In Just Landscape, the song operates as both an auditory and emotional anchor, resonating with themes of displacement, war, and survival.

The film’s opening text introduces another layer of coded language, drawn from anonymous messages posted on Telegram channels in Kyiv. These cryptic lines—such as “three green olives and one black olive near the metro”—function as warnings, alerting men to the presence of mobilization brigades. “Olives” symbolize draft officers in green uniforms, “black olives” refer to the police, and “clouds” signal patrols that sweep through the city. A message like “Rain washed away a few cars” signifies that several men were detained at that location. This clandestine language, designed to evade surveillance, blurs the boundary between poetry and survival tactics. These texts take on a double meaning—resisting easy interpretation while simultaneously revealing the mechanisms of war and control. The tension between opacity and reveling mirrors the film’s fragmented storytelling, inviting viewers to decipher its hidden messages or simply absorb its atmosphere of quiet urgency.

Artist talk: April 3, 2025, 7.30pm
“Language of Survival: Dana Kavelina in conversation with Asia Bazdyrieva”

The exhibitions are curated by Salzburger Kunstverein’s director Mirela Baciak.