At MoMA PS1, The Gatherers doesn’t unfold so much as accumulate. It resists linearity. It moves in waves and shifts, swelling with objects and gestures that cling to use even after their function is gone. A kind of choreography between survival and excess. Between what we throw away and what keeps coming back.
The first thing I see is dark days (2025), a skeletal tunnel by Tolia Astakhishvili. At first it looks like a shelter, a ruined corridor. But up close, it’s dense with miniature structures. A ghost city, built from scraps and residue, papered with warnings and tiny arrangements. Not quite post-apocalyptic. It feels alive, but barely. Like something still trying to perform its role in a world that no longer needs it.
Directly ahead, two screens show so many things I’d like to tell you (2025), a collaboration between Astakhishvili and Dylan Peirce. Objects are scanned in slow sequence. One by one. Not quite documentation, not quite grief. It feels manic and meticulous, like trying to archive a world already gone, or hoarding the remains before someone else does.
A kind of infrastructural logic flows across the room. Jean Katambayi Mukendi’s mural Doors (2023) unfurls like a dream of transit—schematic, electric, veined with circuit-like forms. Next to it stands Klara Lidén’s Untitled (Haltestelle) (2024), a Berlin bus stop with all of its utility removed. No signage, no schedule. Just its bare architecture. Both pieces feel like warnings about systems meant to keep us moving, now stranded and ambiguous.
Further in, a mechanical sound starts up. Selma Selman’s Flower of Life (2024) grinds open and closed in slow motion. It is built from hydraulic metal claws and construction debris, jerking between lotus blossom and industrial deathtrap. Painted eyes stare out from the metal petals. Her work often draws from her family’s background in metalwork and scrap labor. Here, it feels like the machine has taken on the weight of that history. Exhausted and still dangerous.
In another room, I find myself in front of Nick Relph’s Lusty Ghost and Chaos (both 2025), a series of thin aluminum prints that rework those torn, low-res “Cash for Cars” flyers taped to lampposts. The language is still there but smudged and warped, like a ghost of fast consumer exchange now caught in a longer loop. They are somehow funny and sad at once. Ads without urgency. Capitalism’s debris pressed into something fragile.
Ser Serpas’s Backdrop (2025) dominates the space near the flower. A huge canvas leans into the room. It looks like it absorbed the painting of other paintings—layers of residue and dust. It barely tries to behave like a painting. Maybe that’s the point. The gesture is both massive and casual. You feel like you’ve walked into the aftermath of something. Around the corner, in an adjacent space, her sculptures sprawl—assemblages of discarded furniture, drywall, torn upholstery. They lean and slide and press against each other like they’re trying to stay upright. The room feels like an emptied apartment that didn’t quite finish being lived in.
Against a striking yellow wall hang Miho Dohi’s works. Their modest scale demands a slower eye. Especially buttai 46 (2018), where a green-painted, envelope-like form seems to fold in on itself. Made from cloth, wire, and pigment, it feels stitched together with care but not precision. Like it was built from what was nearby and had to make do.
The last corridor shifts tone. It becomes clinical, fluorescent. Geumhyung Jeong’s Removed Parts: Restored (2025) lines the walls with silicone body parts—ears, mouths, stomachs, genitals. They repeat across shelves in uncanny rhythm. I don’t know if I’m in a factory or a failed museum. There’s something deeply Cronenberg-esque about it. The fetishisation of anatomy, medical realism turned surreal and slightly grotesque. It stays with me longer than I expect.
We moved through it like trespassers, somewhat out of place. The works lingered, unpolished and persistent. There was no narrative to resolve, no single thread to follow. But something stuck, a sense of being among things not usually held up. Materials left out, processes undone, gestures that stayed quiet. Maybe that’s what the exhibition asked of us: not to interpret, but to stay with it. To look at what’s usually overlooked, and leave carrying something that won’t explain itself right away.
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The Gatherers includes: Karimah Ashadu (British-born Nigerian, b. 1985), Tolia Astakhishvili (Georgian, b. 1974, with Dylan Peirce and Maka Sanadze), Miho Dohi (Japanese, b. 1974), Andro Eradze (Georgian, b. 1993), He Xiangyu (Chinese, b. 1986), Samuel Hindolo (American, b. 1990), Geumhyung Jeong (Korean, b. 1980), Klara Liden (Swedish, b. 1979), Jean Katambayi Mukendi (Congolese, b. 1974), Nick Relph (British, b. 1979), Selma Selman (Bosnian, b. 1991), Ser Serpas (American, b. 1995), Emilija Škarnulytė (Lithuanian, b. 1987), Zhou Tao (Chinese, b. 1976).
Albert Riera Galceran is an artist and co-founder and editor of émergent magazine based in Barcelona.
