HOBART.- Simon Denny digs deep into the topic of extraction in Mine, a new exhibition at Mona. Featuring new sculpture, a giant board game and augmented reality, Mine maps the inextricable links between resource and data mining in the largest exhibition by the New Zealand artist to date.

Exploring themes of work and automation, the exhibition takes the Australian mining industry as a case study to interrogate the effects of technology on human labour. In Mine, Denny—whose previous work has examined cryptocurrency, capitalism and surveillance—connects mineral and resource mining with the more opaque world of data collection. Setting these extractive practices against a backdrop of colonisation, ethics and economics, Mine reflects on them in terms of both hope and anxiety about the environment, technology, and development.

The catalogue for this exhibition takes the form of a playable board game, Extractor, based on the classic Australian sheep-farming game Squatter. With each player representing an aspiring data platform, the aim of the game is to achieve global business domination using data as a commodity. Extractor’s rule book features work from a range of writers, including an essay from author, activist and academic Tony Birch. Researchers Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler have contributed a paper unpacking the data, labour and mineral footprint of a single AI system, Amazon’s Echo.

A giant version of Squatter fills a gallery space in the exhibition. Designed to look like the skeleton of a trade show for the mining industry, visitors walk among Denny’s sculptures—constructions of automated machines and products that are changing the way that humans work and resources are extracted.

Mine explores the role technology plays in environmental damage, contributing simultaneously to endangering species and efforts to learn about and protect them. An augmented reality King Island Brown Thornbill, a bird on the verge of extinction, inhabits a sculpture of an Amazon patented warehouse packing cage intended to contain a human worker, symbolising the proverbial canary in the coalmine of climate change.

The exhibition also features a series of figurative sculptures and artworks depicting varying forms of labour and automation by Australian and international artists. These include Patricia Piccinini’s Game Boys Advanced (2002) showing two children playing with a gameboy displayed alongside Li Liao’s Consumption (2012), based on his experience working at Foxconn, a notorious electronics manufacturer. Selected by Mona’s curators, the sculptures form a metaphorical workforce.

Simon Denny says: ‘Coming to terms with a picture of the world that includes the effects of industry on the planet, people and other forms of life is urgent. I’m very excited to be able to present an exhibition in a cavernous space like Mona’s that tries to give form to the complex relationship between life, data, resources and the hierarchies of work.’

Mona curator Jarrod Rawlins adds: ‘Technology is such an important part of human development, it’s impossible to separate it from ourselves. Simon Denny’s deep interest in how technology shapes our lives, combined with his unique sculptural aesthetic, makes for an exhibition experience unlike anything we’ve done before at Mona.’

Mine opens on 8 June 2019 and runs until 13 April 2020. The exhibition is curated by Jarrod Rawlins with Emma Pike from Mona.

Simon Denny (*1982 Auckland, lives and works in Berlin) is an artist and occasional curator who chronicles the work of technologists and their relationship to politics and society. He represented New Zealand at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and has made solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Galleries, London; MoMA PS1, New York; Kunstverein München, Munich; mumok, Vienna; Portikus, Frankfurt am Main; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; OCAT, Shenzhen; Artspace, Sydney; Christchurch Art Gallery, Christchurch and MOCA, Cleveland, among others. He is a professor of Time-based Media at the HFBK in Hamburg and co-founder of the artist-mentoring program BPA // Berlin Program for Artists.