Rust
Rust appears as a stage of decay. It eats away each day, breaking things down slowly into a brittle wreck. It affects not only the visible surface, changing the color and the texture, but burrows its way down to the heart of an object, spreading like a cancer, but usually it is killing something that is already dead.
The structures and objects that Karim Talaat came across on a visit to the former steel works at Kladno are no longer in use, today it is a museum. With the camera he could pause the process of deterioration, freezing a moment in time, and although in reality the rust has now bitten in deeper, here it can do no more damage. Using the geometrics, lines, shapes and contrasts of the spaces and structures, our eye follows these man-made paths, inducing movement and retracing the steps that those who once worked there traversed every day.
This coal mine brought a source of energy to power the everyday running of the country. Coal mining is hard and dirty work, but the efforts of the people who worked here brought heat, energy and light to people near and far. Nowadays we measure energy production with harsh scrutiny, trying to balance the increasing demand with the hunt for cleaner and cheaper sources, but we haven’t yet been able to shake our dependency on coal. How long will coal mining exist? Will all the coal mines of the world one day stand deserted like this one?
A place with a history always has it’s stories embedded in every visual element. The textures and colours are worn and altered through time, and here the colors have been dulled by rust and decay, but in some spots the clearer shades of the original paint shines through, and our imaginations can reverse the process of corrosion to remember retrospectively what the mine was once like, before it ground to a halt.
Roaming through the series, a sense of nostalgia is ever present. Maybe it’s a feeling we’ve learned to embrace confronted with ruin, ever since the romantics first started painting the remnants of ancient cities. But there must be a reason why the broken down and the stagnant catch our eyes. Whether or not people like old falling down buildings in their neighborhood, from the removed world of the image we can contemplate the aesthetics of the effects of rust from a safe distance.
If you consider the corrosive effect on the former mine like the lines on a person’s face, they are really just a sign of the memories and histories of that place, for some they spell ugliness, for others beauty. These marks are not as inconspicuous as the traces of time a rock or a forest, which has learnt to hide it’s wrinkles through eons of practice. Man made structures seem more reluctant to let go of their memories, and rust is just one of the many forms of writing on the exponential curve of history.
Text by Currator Sussane Kass
Exhibition at Gallery Four Corners in Bar No.7,Na Struze 7,Praha 1
From 17th of January until 19th of February 2012