Ronald Kolb
Post-Exhibitionary Practice

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https://www.m1-hohenlockstedt.de/en/kuratieren/m1-kuratieren-202526/transmitting-wind/

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2025/26 Advancement Award Exhibition of the Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung
Curated by Ronald Kolb

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An art installation by Eda Aslan.

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In Transmitting Wind, Eda Aslan transformed atmospheric data into a subtle physical presence within M.1. The telematic installation established a real-time connection between Hohenlockstedt and a distant landscape affected by recurring dust storms. Coordinates and meteorological information gathered elsewhere controlled fans inside the exhibition, translating movements of air into pressure, currents and sensations on the skin.

The distant event did not appear as an image. It arrived as an atmosphere: nearly invisible, yet bodily perceptible. This restrained intervention disturbed the apparent stability of the exhibition space and asked how geographically remote processes enter everyday experience. Wind and dust became carriers that cross political borders without permission, connecting landscapes through material circulation.

The Archive Is Not Sterile
The installation formed part of Aslan’s long-term research project It Was Their Dust That We Breathed In. Her research examines the “pathology of care” within institutions and focuses on the toxic substances that may accompany acts of collecting and conservation. Museum objects have often been treated with chemicals such as mercury chloride, leaving residues that remain materially active even when their histories have been forgotten or suppressed.

By attending to dust, Aslan challenged the idea of the archive or collection as a neutral and sterile environment. Conservation can protect an object while simultaneously introducing toxicity. Decisions about what is preserved, removed or destroyed are therefore never exclusively technical; they also reflect institutional and ideological priorities.

Textual and research materials situated the transmitted atmospheric event within these wider histories. Dust connected bodily sensation to macropolitical processes, while the wind carried sediments of memory into the exhibition. What appeared to be empty air became a dense field of geography, toxicity and historical violence.

Atmospheric Annexation
Aslan describes this institutional gesture as a form of “atmospheric annexation.” The exhibition temporarily appropriated the atmosphere of another place and made it present in Hohenlockstedt. Yet the work also exposed this act of appropriation. It asked what it means to bring a distant landscape into an institution, who controls the translation and what may be lost when an atmosphere becomes data.

The work extended the ecological focus of the 2025/26 Advancement Awards beyond visible landscapes and living organisms. Ecology appeared as a politics of circulation involving air, raw materials, data, memory and bodies. Transmitting Wind made this interdependence perceptible through a quiet encounter: a breeze in the room that arrived from somewhere else and carried more with it than could be seen.