Making Something out of Nothing
Read 130
관리자 2025-12-15 09:35
마티아스 케슬러 & 아멧 치벨렉 Mathias Kessler and Ahmet Civelek.jpg (435.82 KB)Mathias Kessler and Ahmet Civelek, Making Something out of Nothing, 2025, plastic waste weaving, mixed material, metal structures, 600 × 1200 cm.
Mathias Kessler and Ahmet Civelek collaborate between the US, Austria, and Turkey, focusing on discarded plastics. Their practice highlights how plastics do not simply end once thrown away, but continue to have an impact across the world long afterward.
Making Something out of Nothing is a large recycled plastic carpet created together by the two artists and numerous participants. Using discarded packaging and plastic waste collected throughout Busan—particularly around Dadaepo Beach—they hand-wove a colorful carpet. Long strips of plastic were cut with knives and scissors, then woven together piece by piece, creating colorful patterns and rhythms.
The work is hanging on two metal structures, allowing viewers to walk beneath it and closely observe the colors, patterns, traces, and presence of plastics that have already accumulated in our surroundings, often without our notice.
By breaking down the boundary between waste and craft, the two artists give new life to discarded materials, transforming them into art that reveals issues of marine pollution and the value of recycling.
Mathias Kessler and Ahmet Civelek collaborate between the US, Austria, and Türkiye to explore the geopolitical context of waste and the afterlives of industrial materials. Kessler’s practice draws on art, science, and environmental history to reconsider representations of nature. Civelek brings a performative, research-based approach that broaden their engagement with embodied knowledge. Their work assigns aesthetic and political value to debris, creating a space where systems of consumption and global inequality are made visible and subject to critique.