As organic material changes and decomposes over time, it becomes a living record of its own existence.

When used in an artistic context, these natural substances hold an indexical quality – meaning that the medium itself adds a layer of associations, as well as evidences the texture of time.

Kader Attia uses couscous to cast the city of Ghardaïa, Algeria. An art conservator might call this ‘inherent vice’, when the fundamental nature or components of an artwork makes deterioration occur faster or in an unpredictable way.

Though inherent vice has a certain negative connotation and may deter some collectors or curators, many artists choose to embrace the poetics of decay – and time becomes a medium, or a friend.

This is not a ruin. I am not representing a ruin. The crumbling of this installation throughout the exhibition is significant of life, of the living process of the architecture through time. For me, it’s very important that Ghardaïa starts to crumble, for one to think about time.

Kader Attia, in conversation with Josh Ginsburg for The Future Is Behind Us, 29 November, 2022.

The Drag Paintings host a variety of cracks, faded areas, and interesting smells. For Moshekwa Langa, the way these works behave is akin to how a memory behaves as time unfolds.

The work was created by dragging canvases across the dirt roads of his childhood town, Bakenberg. With platinum mining gaining traction in the area, one day the original road might be tarred over, and red soil, like its canvas counterpart, will fade from memory.

As part of a residency at A4, Zayaan Khan and Heather Thompson manifested The Apocalypse Pantry as an optimistic guard against the fragile food systems of our world.

A productive contradiction: inherent vice is deliberately produced to ferment the food, but in fermenting, it sustains its life. We are able to slow decay, build context, and engage in land/food justice for the sustainability of our future(s).

The process of decay might be the artwork itself.

garden for fanon consists of a community of earthworms and copies of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, buried beneath soil.

“The worms are making soil as they’re eating books – this is a game of meaning,” says Nolan Oswald Dennis. “There is something funny about having worms in a gallery, eating a book. What makes it funny is what gives it weight.”

In these works, organic material transcends its everyday role to become a medium for exploring temporality, memory, and preservation.

We are asked to consider how the destruction of material can become a creation of meaning.