Catalogue > At random

The work combines material from the Effelsberg radio telescope in Germany with my conversations with several geoengineering experts. Calm images are overlaid with discussions that follow a wide range of topics – questions about visual models and their real life impact, uncertain- ties connected to geoengineering, questions about power and CO2 mitigation, guesses about climate warming and the probability of stratospheric aerosol injection deploy- ment. The design of one of the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope in Effelsberg is massive yet mechanically relatively simple. It is used to research distant territories far away from Earth, the formation of stars and the disap- pearance of matter into black holes. Also to detect radio waves from neighboring galaxies. I have chosen this as a research object in order to think about what can be perceived and understood through visibility? How visual simplicity fails to convey the complexity of such sets of relationships? Or how to think of inconceivable scales? Effelsberg stems from my research about solar geoengi- neering, that theoretizises the idea, that it will be pos- sible imitate the activity of volcanoes and thus reduce climate warming. One of the most scientifically studied processes describes the spraying of large amounts of aerosols into the stratosphere, where they would scatter the sun’s radiation and thereby reduce the amount of energy reaching the earth’s surface. It would be a delib- erate intervention in the global climate system, it would have to be done for about a few hundred years, and its fully realised form could not be interrupted without cata- strophic consequences.

Ivar Veermäe (born 1982 in Tallinn, lives and works in Berlin) received a BA in photography from the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2009 and a MA in 2014 at Spatial Strategies department in Weissensee Kunsthochschule Berlin. He has received various scholarships and grants – Kunstfonds Arbeitsstipendium, Edith-Russ-Haus Media Art Grant, Elsa-Neumann-Stipendium Berlin and scholarships from Estonian Cultural Endowment. The artist has had solo exhibitions in Edith-Russ-Haus, Oldenburg, Germany, Gallery im Turm, Berlin, Tallinn Art Hall Gallery, City Gallery of Tallinn, Estonia, AV17 Gallery in Vilnius, Lithuania, Cultural Center Belgrade in Serbia, among others. His work has been exhibited in group exhibitions at Riga Biennale, BIENALSUR in Buenos Aires, Venice Architecture Biennale, transmediale Festival in HKW, Moscow Biennale for Young Art, the Bozar in Brussels, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Netherlands, the Art Museum of Estonia, Art Hall of Tallinn, the Estonian Contemporary Art Museum, the Kulturhuset Bronden in Denmark, the Kunstverein Kassel, the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, the Kunstverein Wolfsburg, the Pinnacles Gallery in Australia. His videos are being screened at the Rencontres Internationales in Paris and Berlin, in HeK Basel, transmediale Festival, e-flux.com, MoMa web platform, AND Festival in Manchester, EMAF in Osnabrück, Kasseler Dokfest, Crosstalk festival in Budapest, in Virtual Memorial, Cambodia.