RUBY REDING 
Rotterdam


I am an artist and researcher, working with sculpture, moving image, archives and participatory workshops. My work asks how we can attune differently to our experiences of agency and proximity under colonial and ecological degradation. I consider image-making as a site of possible intimacy, and try to offer counter forms of value to the way material is treated in mining and commodity circulation under late capitalism.

My research instigates sensory and submerged fieldwork methods at sites of environmental violence and scientific apparatus, such as water engineering sites, weather towers, mines and factories. Through different cameras in filmmaking and metals or textile in sculpture, I explore what kinds of gathering and gaze might repair our relationship to materials and each other.

My recent project on aluminium and bauxite asks why we are drawn to shiny materials, and the evolution of ‘lustre’, the light of minerals in geology, as emerging from white people’s draw to weightlessness, domination and control.

I have facilitated workshops in Rotterdam and London at Turf Projects including collaborative filmmaking in the field, river ecologies and poetics. From 2023–2024, I was Researcher in the Fine Art department at Goldsmiths, University of London. I have programmed exhibitions on energy infrastructure such as ‘shadow circuits’, at MaMA in Rotterdam.


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RUBY REDING
Rotterdam

I work with sculpture, poetry and moving image to feel out our disconnection from resource supply chains, sites of infrastructure and each other. I draw on the elemental and rhythmic to attune differently to our experiences of agency, proximity and metabolism under late capitalism.

My research instigates fieldwork to sites of environmetental violence, sensing apparatus and infrastructure, such as water engineering sites, weather towers, mines and factories. I collect scrap materials and visit archives, asking how these methodologies can offer slanted knowledges and forms of material intimacy.



︎︎︎ Email: rubyreding@gmail.com
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shadow circuits, exhibition at MaMA Rotterdam


‘The patter of rain on urban glass rinses the collection of particulate matter and industrial chemicals into a concentrated wash that flows down into the urban sewers. returning water and chemicals to the lake that is itself a legacy dumping ground of pcbs from an era of­ twentieth-century settler colonial industrial exuberance.’
—M Murphy

The sound of a gas pipeline leaking bleeds into the atmosphere like an airplane gathering speed in rocky turbulence. The splintering noise might echo water flowing inside a home, heard through hush sounds behind the sofa. shadow circuits traces elemental flows, from the brackish salt waters running into port toxicities to the gas circulating under our feet from Mexico to Italy.

These journeys reveal the hidden paths or ‘shadow geologies’ that shape everyday materials, from mining and extraction to industrial processing, shipping and domestic use. Global supply chains are rooted in a lineage of extraction that continues to place labour and environmental risk on Indigenous land and colonised regions. This history upholds our conditions of comfort, where infrastructure quietly absorbs inequality and makes it seem distant or invisible.
© 2345—45/42 Lipsum