ONKALO

with a site-specific work by
Armin Keplinger
and
HeHe, Egor Kraft,
Klaus Lutz

Exhibition curated by insitu collective
( Marie Graftieaux, Nora Mayr, Gilles Neiens, Lauren Reid)

22 October 2016 - 21 January 2017
insitu, Berlin

Corridor I: Onkalo (install view) 2016. Left: Egor Kraft, URL Stone 2015, marble, JPG File, Wikipedia article, single-channel video, 95 x 70 cm.Courtesy of Multimedia Art Museum Moscow. Photo: Markus Georg

In 2020 the first long-term nuclear waste repository in the world will be ready for use in Finland under the name Onkalo. Onkalo is a deep geological construction, built over a period of 25 years and made for storing highly radioactive nuclear waste in a safe manner until its decay in 100,000 years. The project raises questions not only about the conservation, reliability and durability of the site, but also of how life on earth could look like in a very distant future and how to protect the inhabitants from opening the site.

For Corridor I: Onkalo visitors enter into speculations of how to transmit information about the site’s danger over thousands of years; of imagining who or what that information will be transmitted to; and what the potential discoverers will believe they have found when they come across Onkalo.

This exhibition is intended as a multilayered discussion around the topic of Onkalo, mixing artistic positions and non-art materials with a site-specific commissioned work by artist Armin Keplinger.

Corridor I: Onkalo is the first of insitu collective’s Cycle IV, an ambitious series of three exhibitions that deals with the potential of time travel. Described as Corridors, each exhibition begins with a significant moment related to scientific discoveries or notorious events in history and takes visitors on an unfolding narrative that provides a special exhibition-viewing experience into the heart of the topic.