The text by the entrance to the current group show at MoMA PS1 sets up high expectations. First it offers a sweeping survey of artworks which “have addressed excess,” from ancient Greek mosaics of feast leftovers to postwar assemblages of mass-produced commodities. Then it positions the exhibition as a new chapter in this history and a response to the present moment, “when waste accrues amidst the tumult of extremism, war, and climate catastrophe.” “The Gatherers” presents work by fourteen artists born toward the end of the last century—and so raised in an increasingly globalized, digitally connected world—who “direct their attention to the margins and gutters” to “grapple with the cumulative effects of everyday detritus and junked infrastructures.”
After this introduction, chief curator Ruba Katrib provides no overarching framework. Films, sculptures, installations, paintings, and photographs from around the world are displayed across a floor of the museum with occasional captions but scant indication of the rationale for their inclusion or position. The show opens with a room of Ser Serpas’s arrangements of stuff scavenged on New York streets—a smashed-up computer on an old desk chair, for example, and an antique rowing machine propped vertically inside a metal shelving rack—shortly followed by a screening room showing Emilija Škarnulytė’s hour-long film, Burial (2022), about the decommissioned Ignalina nuclear power station in Lithuania, an atmospheric study of post-Soviet geopolitics and the afterlife of spent uranium. Across the hallway, Nick Relph’s photocopies of weathered gas meter covers in Rome hang near a projection of Karimah Ashadu’s documentary, Brown Goods (2020), about a Nigerian man who lives in Hamburg selling discarded products back to West Africa, and a selection of Miho Dohi’s sculptures—expressive bundles of carved, stitched, and painted material—called buttai, a Japanese word that conjoins the Kanji characters for “thing” and “body.”
These unwieldly sentences reflect the experience of walking through the space, of winding arbitrarily between distinct media, modes of spectatorship, and regional histories. Some works require little justification. Ashadu’s character study, for instance, meets the introduction’s promises, using an intimate first-person narrative as a way into the margins of the postcolonial world system, where precarious workers and outmoded commodities meet. Many inclusions, however, address the theme only at the most superficial level. Most obvious in this regard is Backdrop (2025), a vast canvas by Serpas which, according to a nearby caption, is covered in “excess paint and gestures” having been placed behind smaller works-in-progress in the studio. Supposedly “extending a logic of collecting material on the margins,” the work takes a painfully literal approach to the relation between artistic production and social reality rather than engaging with marginal aesthetics or lifeforms. (Far from subverting hierarchies of value, the fetishization of studio scraps has long contributed to myths of artistic genius.) Still more bewildering, several works on show—including He Xiangyu’s swinging racks of smooth river stones and Samuel Hindolo’s eerie cityscapes—stretch the curatorial focus to the point of dissolution, lacking any meaningful connection to the issues at hand.
Despite the grandiose introduction, with its clear thematic and temporal focus as well as its invocation of several global crises, the ensuing exhibition offers no coherent vision about our current moment or the art it has provoked, not to mention how the two might interact. Instead of finding a generative model for understanding the sprawling chaos that is contemporary artistic production, “The Gatherers” merely reproduces the chaos. The captions, catalog essays, and audio guide snippets attend separately to each artist, providing few ideas about how their practices relate. The result is closer to a commercial gallery summer group show than a thoroughly researched museum survey—an impression partly explained by the fact that many of the works are offcuts from recent, more complete solo exhibitions in New York and elsewhere.
What is most remarkable about the art on display, given the show’s subject is material abjection, is how committed it seems to conventional notions of taste. Xiangyu’s neat rock collection would not look out of place on an uptown roof terrace and Klara Liden’s sculptures, dotted through the galleries, may consist of scavenged bits of Berlin street furniture but nevertheless mimic sleek modernist forms and adhere to a muted color scheme of beiges, silvers, and grays. “The margins and gutters” have never looked so stylish; it is as if the history of practices designed to offend audiences by exposing society’s repulsive underbelly, from Eli Lotar’s abattoir photos to Piero Manzoni’s canned shit, never happened. Rather than push “against the forces that attempt to conceal the aftermaths of our contemporary lifestyles,” as Katrib suggests in the catalog, “The Gatherers” works overall to affirm humanity’s delusions of unhampered control over the material world.
With environmental collapse and the rise of digital computing, the last forty years have been defined by the opposite: a dispersal of agency across nonhuman natural and technological forces. In the sculptural works here, though, matter is rendered lifeless—extracted, manipulated, and aestheticized without struggle or consequence. Even Geumhyung Jeong, known for performances in which she interacts with animatronic figures to probe the boundary between humans and machines, is represented with only Removed Parts: Restored (2025), an installation of components taken from tools used in other works—inert objects meticulously categorized and laid out across four plinths. Gathering, the process of recontextualizing found scraps within the gallery, emerges at PS1 not as an effective method for illustrating or interrogating social issues but as a way of denying the collapsing world beyond, of asserting an illusory sense of order against the oncoming deluge.
