Toxic Intimacies: Extraction, the Nuclear-Industrial Complex, and Contemporary Art

As part of this digital residency carried out in partnership with Érudit, writer and curator Katie Lawson explores the links between extraction, geology, and colonialism. With sustainability in mind, she rethinks the role of exhibition curators as an act of care extended to ecosystems. In dialogue with Indigenous artists, she examines the invisible consequences of the nuclear-industrial context and the capacity of art to reveal and dismantle environmental and colonial violence.

In 2024, I curated an exhibition for Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (KWAG) called Erratic Behaviour, featuring artworks that draw on historic and contemporary entanglements between people and geologic events, processes, or entities, acknowledging rocks as vibrant matter that shape our understanding of time and place. As a title, Erratic Behaviour plays with the two meanings of erratic: on the one hand, it is a geological term for a specific kind of rock that has travelled (often with glacial melt) from one place to another; on the other hand, it is a descriptor of behaviour that is unstable or irregular. 

The exhibition suggested that the industrial extraction, processing, consumption, and disposal of natural resources itself is a form of erratic behaviour, as select humans and corporations have produced turbulent conditions globally. I sought to develop a curatorial methodology that would mitigate waste and champion sustainability in all aspects of exhibition design, logistics, and methods of display, as I worked responsively to material sourced in the forgotten corners of storage at the hosting institution and set parameters such as only using ground transportation within a specified radius for the delivery of work (to name but two examples).