Nikolaus Eckhard

°1987
research interests: capitalocene, futures, materiality, collaboration, socio-ecological transformation, soil
en

Nikolaus Eckhard is a Vienna-based artist focusing on collaborative and participatory sculpture, film and performance. In his artistic research practice, he examines information transfer between materials and bodies to get a glimpse of the traces our lives leave in the stones. He co-heads the artistic research project Reverse Imagining Vienna at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. He is also a co-founder of the art initiative die Feldversuche (Field Experiments) providing artists with the opportunity to work on food production and urbanization at a community farm in Vienna.

 

research

research expositions (collaborated)

  • Greenwashed Concrete. Artistic Research With, On, and Against Concrete, Concerning Conflicting Concepts of Its Sustainability (2024) author(s): Christoph Weber, Nikolaus Eckhard published in: Journal for Artistic Research
    Environmental science has shown that the global use of concrete has led to significant challenges today and will seriously trouble future generations. Nevertheless, international building industries advertise concrete as a natural, regional, sustainable, and hence green material. In 2020, global human-made mass exceeded all living biomass, with concrete accounting for nearly half of it, making it a signal of the Capitalocene. A radical transformation of industrial building culture is asked for, otherwise anthropogenic mass will be three times biomass by 2040. The growth of the technosphere is amplifying multiple negative currents in the pluriverse — air pollution, lithospheric extraction, and hydrosphere depletion — all with catastrophic effects on biodiversity. This exposition displays the steps in and findings of the artistic research project Greenwashed Concrete. Setting out to widen understanding of the multi-layered material concrete, this project applied a methodology of juxtaposing two sculptural practices in order to collaboratively design experimental settings to engage scholars from heterogeneous fields. Download Accessible PDF
     open exposition comments (0)