Karen Russo’s exhibition at Way Out East Gallery is a culmination of a yearlong research and collaboration with University of East London.

At the heart of the exhibition is Sinkholes, a new 16mm film shot around the shores of the Dead Sea. Blending documentary camerawork and fictional narrative, Sinkholes creates a near future world where water is scarce. Russo’s camera navigates between the deserted beaches and architectural ruins, the salt flats, withering date palms and sinkholes that make this landscape so unsettlingly dystopian.

Lawrence, the film’s narrator, introduces us to his life in the salt dunes along an unnamed coast, ten years after a global environmental catastrophe that has led to the death of most of the world’s population. Most survivors have left for the coasts where they purify seawater for drinking, but the vast quantities of salt produced by the desalination machines are turning the landscape into a white desert of salt dunes. The dumping of industrial waste has created a skin over the world’s oceans, obstructing the hydrologic cycle and leading to successive years of drought and dry riverbeds. Water is the new currency and people fight over what little there is. Civilization has collapsed and, in the competition for scarce resources, people have succumbed to violence. Lawrence’s voice-over narration describes his thoughts, fears, and reactions as he navigates through this material and psychic desert, documenting his last days as the world disintegrates.

Sinkholes blends documentary and fiction – a hallmark of Russo’s filmic approach. This has the effect of distorting our sense of time, provoking an uncanny sense that this dystopian future is already present or close at hand. The film draws on the defamiliarization techniques of J.G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss, while also referencing the American land artist Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), a massive installation of basalt rocks in Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Russo also drew on the ideas in Smithson’s essay Leaning Mirrors and Yucatan Mirror Displacements, in which he raises questions about nature and culture, reality and representation as well as his concept of ‘ruins in reverse’ by which he expresses the effect of entropy - the world’s movement toward chaos.

A photographic series, featuring stills and location photography will be exhibited alongside the film.

Published by University of East London

Sinkholes documents Karen Russo’s recent film project and research into the rapid drying of the Dead Sea.

Includes an essay by Debra Shaw and an interview by Valentina Vitali

Published by: University of East London

Design: Christy Taylor

Paperback, 44 pages

Dimensions: 30.4 x 21.6 x 0.5 cm

£10

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