MoMA PS1’s group exhibition, The Gatherers, hosts a blink-and-you-will-miss-it work – a tiny gold nail banged into a white wall, titled Nail (2025). Installed above Selma Selman’s other much larger installation Motherboards (2025), a generous pile of discarded keyboards, Nail’s unassuming statement embodies the show’s overall sentiment perhaps better than any other work. The Amsterdam-based artist extracted the valuable material from computer central processing units in collaboration with her own family, who operate a scrap metal recycling business. There is an entanglement of value and disuse, disarming the viewer with the stark tactility of waste and the slippery feeling of transforming disgust into beauty.
The museum’s curator, Ruba Katrib, selected 14 artists who consider the debris, residue and excess of humanity’s mental and physical obsessions. He Xiangyu’s Rock Tongue (2024) is an intriguing sculpture in which natural stones collected from rivers are fastidiously placed within metal rings. Visitors find themselves inspecting each separate rock, discovering their unique erosion-related patinas. It is a piece that sits somewhere between obsessiveness and meditation. Elsewhere, in Backdrop (2025), Ser Serpas presents a similarly engaging display of found objects – this time, items which have all lost their former purpose, like an abandoned plastic seesaw. They haunt the gallery space with a spectral materiality – left rotten, mouldy, dirty and broken – oscillating between recognition and obscurity. The piece expands upon a previous installation of assemblages shown at Whitney Biennial last year.
Unlike the wide array of Serpas’ poetic clutter, Selman’s keyboards above the gilded nail thrill in their uniformity – hypnotising sameness also shrouds the trashed computer devices, humming the bygone sounds of tapping fingers. It is a visceral reminder that the past, and the items made there, do not cease to exist. They shape every aspect of the future. Other works on view include Emilija Škarnulyté’s Burial (2022), a film which travels into the vast Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant (INPP) in Lithuania, now undergoing a decommissioning process. There’s also the uncanny, surreal moving-image piece Flowering and Fading (2024) by Andro Eradze, which depicts a domestic scene where the lines between reality and fantasy blur – everyday objects bending and flying. This is a timely show that brings into focus artistic practices grappling with global waste, rummaging for meaning amid the mess of information that shapes 21st century life.
The Gatherers is at MoMA PS1, New York, until 6 October.
Words: Osman Can Yerebakan
Image Credits:
1. Andro Eradze. Flowering and Fading (still). 2024. Video: 4K, 16:22 min. Courtesy the artist, Lo schermo Dell’arte, Fondazione In Between Art Film, and SpazioA Pistoia.
2. Andro Eradze. Flowering and Fading. 2024. 4K video. 16 min., 22 sec. Installation view of The Gatherers, on view at MoMA PS1 from April 24 through October 6, 2025. Courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Kris Graves.
3. Emilija Škarnulyté. Burial. 2022. Single-channel video (color, sound), 60 min. Installation view of The Gatherers, on view at MoMA PS1 from April 24 through October 6, 2025. Courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Kris Graves.
