relics: the ones breathing through their moist skin and those with air tubes piercing their chitin exoskeletons grow scarcer / the saints’ dried cuticles, limbs, wings, sensing organs go round in the projector carousels
The exhibition mutant and nondurable by nabbteeri at Photo North – Northern Photographic Centre’s main gallery showcases the artist collective’s work with invertebrates and encourages the viewer to sense their local environment, the life teeming around them and its disappearance from the perspective of other species.
mutant and nondurable (2020–) is a growing collection of found insect remains and assorted odds and ends that accumulate in the corners of our lives. The arthropods are mounted on 35 mm slide frames and presented as multi-channel projections spread around the rooms of the main gallery, combined with reflective pieces of glass, winter seeder plants and wax sculptures crafted from found materials. The two video works in the exhibition act as portals that extend the world of the exhibition beyond the walls of the gallery. In the first video, children display the dead insects they have collected, while in the second video everyday creatures wander through deserted landscapes to gather for strange rituals.
In their work, nabbteeri draws on the concept of the necropastoral* formulated by the poet Joyelle McSweeney. It throws human-centred thinking out of joint, highlighting the omnipresence of nature and its political power. The necropastoral recognises the agency of bugs, viruses, weeds and mould, where decay, mutation and decomposition create their own kind of order – a non-order of indeterminacy, constant percolation, absorption and permeation. It reveals the experience of environmental destruction and its temporal scale, disconnected from everyday experience. At its core are the endless whirl and multiple temporalities of the various processes of birth and death. The chitinous necropastoral hypertime moves backwards and forwards at meandering frequencies, encompassing at least 150 generations of crickets in a single human lifetime.
The necropastoral aesthetic of nabbteeri’s work is born under ecological collapse: it is dark, gloomy and sad, yet beautiful. The remains of bugs squeezed between slide frames confront the viewer with an uncomfortable reality that we must wrestle with as we try to develop the interspecies politics of the future.
The work of the artists and the exhibition have been supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland, the Alfred Kordelin Foundation and the Kone Foundation.
nabbteeri
mutant and nondurable
Photo North – Northern Photographic Centre, gallery
16.1.2026–26.4.2025
Welcome to the opening on Thursday 15th of January at 18–20!
* Joyelle McSweeney, Bug Time: Chitinous Necropastoral Hypertime against the Future (translated into Finnish by Jouni Teittinen in Tuli & Savu issue #80).
