16mm film, colour/sound, 18:45'

Merging fiction and documentary, Karen Russo’s Sinkholes is a dystopian vision of a future world in which humanity survives in an environment in which water has become scarce and the sea is slowly receding behind dunes of salt. It tells the story of the inhabitants of a desolate coastline, trapped between a desertified interior and an unnamed coast. Following, the first-person voiceover of its protagonist Lawrence, the story unfolds through a sequence of striking documentary scenes, shot in inland and coastal Israel and Palestine. While the landscapes and sites Russo has gathered are real – places of rusting industry, of abandoned habitation and the bizarre, almost extraterrestrial salt formations of the Dead Sea – the narration transforms these into the ruins of an entire society, doomed to a world in which it has ceased to rain.

Following Lawrence in his attempt to make a final journey from the salt-drowned shores of his human settlement to a hoped-for source of fresh water inland, Sinkholes imagines a moment in which time has come to a standstill, where technology and society has devolved to simpler forms, and in which the planet itself has regressed to inorganic and mineralogical processes. Threading together references to a history of artists fascinated by the ideas of entropy and the inhuman – from JG Ballard to Robert Smithson – Sinkholes it is a disturbing and visually haunting mediation on what makes us human; on our desire both for survival and resignation in the face of the possibility of extinction.