LONG ISLAND CITY, NY.- This spring, MoMA PS1 presents The Gatherers, a major exhibition that brings into focus current artistic practices grappling with global waste and excess, as our social and political lives are shaped by the glut of garbage and information. The presentation spans the entirety of the Museum’s third-floor galleries and features 14 international artists—many exhibiting for the first time in a US museum whose practices span sculptural installation, assemblage, painting, video, and performance. The exhibition underscores how retooling detritus has new meaning for a generation grappling with the impacts of recent world orders—such as the ongoing failures of globalization and neoliberalism, amidst failing infrastructure and political instability—and builds on millennia-long art historical traditions utilizing accumulation. Artists in The Gatherers render politics as spatialized in the built environment, drawing attention to how histories reverberate into the future.

A central facet of the exhibition examines artists who touch on the wide-reaching impacts of post-Soviet global reconfigurations. Drawing from the issues faced by Roma communities and her own family’s scrap metal business, Selma Selman (Bosnian, b. 1991) transforms salvaged parts—including cars, construction equipment, and hard drives—into painted canvases and motorized machines, such as Flower of Life (2024). Tolia Astakhishvili (Georgian, b. 1974) creates unraveling installations and domestic architectures whose anxieties evoke the social and political ruptures in the Caucasus region, as opposing visions of the future remain in contest. In a newly commissioned installation, Ser Serpas (American, b. 1995) reconfigures used and discarded materials gathered throughout New York into composed, and often precarious, situations that emphasizes the incoherence of the urban landscape.

Refuting erasures of the recent past across transnational contexts, artists in The Gatherers materialize shared concerns for resource utility, labor, and environmental dangers that persist in the wake of global crises. Unpacking planetary threats from Cold War energy structures, Emilija Škarnulytė’s (Lithuanian, b. 1987) video Burial (2022) draws attention to Lithuania’s Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant—once the most powerful nuclear structure in the world, now undergoing a long decommissioning process. Nick Relph (British, b. 1979) scans flyers offering cash for junked cars in New York City, indexing the city’s vernacular surfaces to manifest its invisible circulation. Shot in continuous motion, Zhou Tao’s (Chinese, b. 1976) film The Axis of Big Data (2024) portrays the evolving relationship between laborers and a data center cradled in the Guizhou mountains, illustrating the shifting landscapes wrought by industry.

Trained as an electrician, Jean Katambayi Mukendi (Congolese, b. 1974) articulates New York’s complex energy systems in a monumental work on paper, Doors (2023), which spans nearly the length of a train car and depicts interconnected flows between extraction, production, and destruction in the city. Unraveling how individuals transmute urban structures, Klara Liden (Swedish, b. 1979) removes objects critical to the functioning of urban life—such as street signage and electrical boxes—from regular use and repositions them as readymade sculpture. Karimah Ashadu’s (British born Nigerian, b. 1985) film Brown Goods follows informal trade through the story of Nigerian migrants who, without the ability to work legally in Germany, earn a living through circuitous labor, collecting used goods in Hamburg and selling them to consumers in Africa. With a focus on the systems embedded in urban structures and systems, these artists reveal the impacts of everyday detritus, junked infrastructures, and resource extraction on precarious ecologies and alternative economies.

As the increasing commodification of daily life brings forth ontological shifts, many artists work in the psychic threshold between surplus and waste, grappling with dissociative impacts accelerated by new technologies. Blurring the dichotomy between human and machine in a newly commissioned work, Geumhyung Jeong (Korean, b. 1980) collects and arranges tools, electronics, and abstracted anatomical models into orderly grids that destabilize prescribed functions, mirroring the endless stream of goods both on store shelves and in landfills. The US premiere of Andro Eradze’s (Georgian, b. 1993) film Flowering and Fading (2024) charts the hauntology of domestic spaces as a dream sequence, with objects and environments disobeying semblances of order. Featuring stones collected from a river in China and strung on undulating rods, He Xiangyu’s (Chinese, b.1986) works Opaque Loop and Rock Tongue (both 2024) generate a tension between erosion and accumulation in the natural world. Samuel Hindolo’s (American, b. 1990) psychological paintings give rise to figures wrought by the dystopian collapse of urban infrastructure. From discarded objects on the streets of Kanagawa, Miho Dohi (Japanese, b. 1974) creates enchanting buttai, objects reassembled into microcosmic proposals of worlds to come made from refuse. The Gatherers offers a novel framework for understanding how artists use refuse to examine the relationships between growth and collapse within global urban landscapes.

A full-color publication accompanies the exhibition and includes a curatorial essay by Katrib, as well as newly commissioned texts by Kristy Bell, Amber Esseiva, Anette Freudenberger, Sheldon Gooch, Summer Guthery, Estelle Hoy, Quinn Latimer, Laura McLean-Ferris, Camila Palomino, Filipa Ramos, Nadim Samman, Fabian Schöneich, and Jeppe Ugelvig. The publication is distributed by Artbook | D.A.P. / Distributed Art Publishers and available for $30.

The Gatherers is organized by Ruba Katrib, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Sheldon Gooch, Curatorial Assistant.