MaMA 

Shadow Circuits opens on February 27 in our showroom. The opening takes place from 18:00 to 21:00.

You can visit the exhibition between February 27 and May 3 2026. Our opening hours are Wednesday to Sunday from 14:00 – 19:00, and every first Friday of the month from 14:00 – 21:00.

Hear the sound of a gas pipeline leaking in the atmosphere, like an airplane gathering speed in rocky turbulence. The splintering noise dulls as the gas flows through pipes inside your home, heard through sounds behind the sofa or the quiet hiss of a stove. That same gas is shipped through the port of Rotterdam from countries such as the US, Norway and Qatar at an annual amount of 12 billion cubic meters—comparable to nearly five million swimming pools—and sent around the Netherlands to other countries in Northern Europe. 

These journeys reveal the hidden paths or ‘shadow geologies’, the often unseen stories of materials, from mining to processing, transport, and everyday use. The systems that move materials around the world are shaped by a long history of extraction, one that continues to place labor and environmental risk on Indigenous land and colonized regions. This upholds our conditions of comfort, where infrastructure quietly absorbs inequality and makes it seem distant or invisible. shadow circuits traces these elemental flows, from the brackish salt waters running into port toxicities to the gas circulating under our feet. 

Seeing artistic practice as field research that is explicitly embedded in the world rather than through isolated studio conditions, the artists here bring together dissonant landscapes in Portugal, Mexico, Italy, Iceland and Indonesia. They are distinct and yet contaminated by the same logistical flows of global capitalism. While the familiar industrial aesthetics caught up in such flows are often large-scale and monumental—such as the shipping container—shadow circuits shifts our attention towards more embodied and intimate encounters.  

This exhibition draws you into the push and pull between the paths planned with rigidity and commerce alongside those that move with the serendipity of the organic—the tear as it drips as a counter clock we cannot time, or the scent of a funerary jasmine that disperses into the room. In this way, shadow circuits shows how the Western scientific desire to measure, control, and plan clashes with the fractures and unpredictable movements that shape life cycles. 

Making resource circulations visible awakens us to our own possible agency in a world otherwise shaped by top-down governance that leaves us passive or powerless. Ruminating in the shadow of these flows, we listen to the lineage of those who are excluded from the story of extraction, such as ghost laborers who contribute to the production of labor on palm fields, hidden gas infrastructures and invasive species caught on ships. In turn, we might feel less alienated from the very minerals and materials that form the earth’s crust, or the networks of energy that pulse as veins across the world.

1. Kathryn Yusoff terms shadow geology in her book ‘A billion black anthropocenes
or none’, through ‘Origins, [which] draw borders that define inclusion and 
exclusion, and their focus is narrow, narrating a line of purpose (read Progress) 
and purposefulness (read Civilization), while overlooking accident, misdirection, 
or the shadow geology of disposable lives, waste, toxicity, contamination, 
extinction, and exhaustion.’ p.34. 

2. Field research emerges out of anthropology and sociology as a type of 
environmentally situated research embedded in the world rather than the laboratory 
or library, and is taken up as artistic practice through different types of 
sensing (sound recording or filmmaking for example), for example by Bridget Crone 
in her book Fieldwork for Future Ecologies (Onomatopee, 2024)

By:
Ruby Reding

With:
David and Amauta
Á. Birna Björnsdóttir
Matteo Bettini
Nabila Ernado
Kyra Nijskenz

Campaign Image:
Samuel White-Evans