MoMA PS1 Chief Curator Ruba Katrib Talks ‘The Gatherers’ Exhibition and What Art Can and Can’t Do

Editor’s Note: This story is part of Newsmakers, a series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making change in the art world.

In late April, MoMA PS1 opened its marquee exhibition for the season, “The Gatherers,” a sweeping group show that considers the psychic and material “burdens” of climate change, globalization, and neoliberalism.

Featuring 14 artists working across sculpture, video, assemblage, and installation, the exhibition connects wide-ranging practices across the world—from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Lithuania—that are unified by an urgent attention to a world defined by overproduction, waste, and failing infrastructure and systems.

Yet “The Gatherers” is far from a lecture. For curator Ruba Katrib, who has served as PS1’s chief curator and director of curatorial affairs since 2017, it was important to let the works “speak for themselves,” through form, material, atmosphere, or repetition.

“The artists have strategies of pulling from, extracting, and intervening that they use to speak about certain issues, but it’s really through the language of creative practice,” Katrib told ARTnews in a recent interview. “But these artists do something more than just tell a story.”

On view through October 6, the resulting show sprawls across PS1’s third floor as an immersive, sound-rich exhibition that invites viewers to engage deeply with the discomfort, dislocation, ambiguity, and—at times—quiet hope embedded in each artist’s practice.

ARTnews spoke with Katrib about the conception of “The Gatherers,” how artists are rising to and interpreting our current moment, and the limits of what art can do.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision.

ARTnews: This show opens amid global upheaval—from worsening climate change to economic precarity and the return of Trump. How did today’s socio-political moment inform the curatorial conception of “The Gatherers”?

Ruba Katrib: I’ve been working on the show for a couple of years now and, of course, it’s not responding to this exact moment since it’s been in formation for some time. But I did want to make a very contemporary show, with artists of not the exact same generation, but of a similar generation. And all the work has been made in the last few years, with some exceptions.

It also came out of the aftermath of the pandemic period. ..It took a minute to see what artists were really doing and responding to at that moment. We can’t anticipate everything that’s happening—particularly now as we’re in such volatile times—but I think these artists are responding to a moment in which we’re on a precipice of sorts. A lot of the subjects that the show is dealing with are interesting to many artists, not just the 14 artists [in the show], but I felt that these artists are rising to the moment in a particular way that I saw as relevant.

Was there something particular about the post-pandemic moment that you think caused a lot of artists to step back and look at exactly how these systems are working?

The pandemic shook up the narrative. A lot of things fell by the wayside, and a lot of things were interrupted. And then a lot of artists had a clearing to step out and become more active. The pandemic also represented a big global change that was also about certain failures in society and culture. I began looking for historical parallels. Emilija Škarnulytė’s 2022 film Burial, for example, is about the decommissioning of a nuclear power plant considered a sister to Chernobyl. I was fascinated. Chernobyl was not only a wide-reaching disaster with global impact—even though it was isolated to a region—but it also revealed failures in the government and infrastructure and scientific advancement that precipitated the fall of the Soviet Union. It pulled back the curtain to reveal the fallibility of so many structures and institutions that were presumed infallible before that. And, of course, that changed the direction of everything. We’re in one of those times now where, somehow, anything is possible, both good and bad.

When I think about Chernobyl, I see it also as a moment in which optimism collapses. Nuclear power was supposed to be a saving grace and Chernobyl, in some way, totally killed enthusiasm for it.

There’s an interesting link with Zhou Tao’s 2024 film The Axis of Big Data, which is about a data center in China. The data center that Zhou is talking about is not powered by nuclear, but hydraulic power, because of where it is built. But the film is in some ways about returning to things from a different era and using them to fulfill a new technological purpose that has a lot of implications and consequences, both positive and negative. I see parallels between the 20th century’s technological shifts and the 21st century’s.

Both of those films, and then a couple of the sculptures in “The Gatherers,” seem to be as much about the way in which there’s not really a clear line between the industrial and natural worlds.

There’s a blurring and flattening that is happening [in many of the works]. There’s this tension between things that are falling apart and becoming outmoded, with the things that are replacing them. And there are a lot of technologies in the show that are slowly being outmoded or have been forgotten, or objects that are fading away and then becoming trash. An artist like Tolia Astakhishvili is very interesting because her works act almost like a sieve that catches all this stuff. But many of the artists in the show are not looking at materials or objects as typologies, really, or even categories. They are more often looking at how categories and typologies get flattened when everything becomes waste or junk.

The title, “The Gatherers,” seems to suggest that, for many of these artists, the method or the material is almost more important than the end product of their process.

To me, it’s more about quantity. The title nods to a few things, but specifically it references The Gleaners, the 1857 painting by Jean-François Millet, and then Agnes Varda’s 2000 film The Gleaners and I. There’s this idea of gleaning, which happens on the edges of society or economies, where people pick up the scraps. But these days, it’s more like heaps. The show is really about this incomprehensible mass of stuff. Each artist has such a different methodology, but many have similar strategies for trying—through art—to gesture at something that is very hard to express, which is this physical mass of stuff. The works are not really informational, but about the psychic burden attached to [dealing with the mass]. There’s this great quote about still lifes that is very important to me by art historian Norman Bryson, “Still life is the world minus its narratives.” It’s this idea that things continue in some other life cycle or existence that we can’t really imagine. Many of these objects and materials will just continue on for hundreds, if not thousands, of years or longer. We don’t really know what the end of the story is at all.

There’s a type of hope embedded in that. We’re all suffused in climate doomer-ism. But a lot of the work seems to just suggest that actually, life is just going to keep going and changing and mutating into whatever it does.

It reminds me of something that someone not in art once said to me. We were talking about the climate, and we were really stressed about what’s going on, which, of course, is very stressful. But they were like, the Earth will continue. There’s all this discourse about the Anthropocene and human impacts, but also, we’re irrelevant within it too somehow. We should be worried about ourselves, but projecting outward is maybe not understanding the real calamity. 

Another touchpoint for the show is Michel Serres, who wrote Malfeasance: Appropriation Through Pollution?, which is a small but fascinating book that argues that property [as a concept] claims and marks space by ruining and soiling things. A factory dumping toxic waste in a river essentially claims that river by making it repellent to other beings. In that sense, the idea of property is inherently destructive: in order to take over areas of the planet, it entails destruction somehow. But Serres broadens the argument in ways that are relevant to the show where he talks about how a billboard that you can see from a mile away is also interfering into all these spaces and realms. He also talks about graffiti in an interesting way, as a more ad-hoc minor way of claiming space, compared to more systematized, detrimental ways of claiming space.

The artists in “The Gatherers” are almost claiming objects—like Klara Liden’s repurposed highway signs or Nick Relph’s reproductions of urban ephemera—as public goods.

They’re objects that have been forgotten too. Klara’s work is so interesting because she’s taking municipal objects that serve purposes, like the junction box, or bus signage, but they’ve been taken over, not only by people—the little graffiti or doodles—but the plaster of flyers on them that have been peeling for however many years. And then they been abandoned, or they’re not really noticed. That’s something that’s important in the show. It’s about a sort of anti-spectacle, because it’s about the things we don’t really see, or notice, or the flows and systems that are largely invisible or hard to visualize.

As I walked through the show, I thought a lot about Minimalism—a movement rooted in industrial materials and manufacturing methods, where artists often imposed strict formal logic on their materials. In contrast, the artists in The Gatherers seem to critique that impulse, favoring salvaged or degraded materials that resist simplicity and order.

Another touch point of the show is a 1961 exhibition at MoMA called “The Art of Assemblage,” which showcased dozens of artists who were working on this new idea of assemblage. Assemblage had manifested prior to that, but it was this idea of the everyday and pulling things from the street, and using non-traditional art materials, and mixing materials. But that was also in a particular time in which it was more novel and the things that would be found on the street were changing because of the postwar consumerism. And so now, even if works look similar aesthetically, it’s very different because what these things mean and what system they’re a part of, and what they refer to, [has changed]. It was important to me that this show was less about the aura of any single object, and more about how each thing is part of a bigger network.

The 14 artists in the show are pretty spread out all over different parts of the world. How important was it to you to represent different parts of the world? What were the resonances that you were finding across the different regions, and how do you represent all that without flattening the very specific context that each artist represents?

I didn’t want to focus on one region or one place, necessarily. The goal was to show how there are shared concerns across global contexts, but that they are specific and based on where people are, where they’re working, and what their situation is. A lot of the artists in the show have a real proximity to issues of excess and waste, or some personal relationship to the materials they are working with, like Selma Selman or Jean Katambayi Mukendi. There’s several examples of that. But it’s also about interconnected economic and circulatory connections. Most of the artists are working in places that have had particular transformations over the last few decades, and they are really thinking through the 1990s and the 2000s. There was the end of the Soviet Union, which signaled the end of one economic-social model. That was replaced by global neoliberalism, which then didn’t really work in the way it was intended, and now we’re in some other situation.

The artists who are working in China, for example, have seen a lot of change in terms of a new globalized economy that has material impacts. For me, that was very interesting, because if you grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, there was a particular way the future has been presented or framed over the latter half of the 20th century. Now we’re seeing how its actually playing out. I feel like we’re in a new time where we can grapple with that and not hold back. We have to let go of the comforting narratives that we have been told because they’re not real. The sooner we do, the more we can address what’s truly at hand. For the show, I didn’t want to put on the burden of any political context, because things need to emerge out of the artists and their works. A lot of exhibitions, particularly group exhibitions, can be over determined. For me, as a curator, I often have a thesis or a question, but you want to allow the path to emerge [organically] and to follow it as much as you direct it.

You mentioned this new moment that we’re in right now. Do you see these artists, and their practices, as marking this new paradigm in terms of creating new narratives or coming to new understandings about the moment were in?

These artists are all very open eyed, and they are really thinking about how art and aesthetics and sensibility can communicate. That comes directly out of research-based or narrative practices. We’re in a time of not only an abundance of waste, but an abundance of information. It’s not like we necessarily need more notifications about everything that’s happening. It’s more about how art can unpeel layers and create a feeling that helps us understand where we are. They’re doing that.

This show is a spatial, experiential exhibition. You don’t see much installation or massive sculptures in shows anymore, and creating a spatial narrative was important to me. In the show, there’s a lot of sound that connects and bleeds in. There’s something palpable that emerges. There’s the sound of the scanner [in Tolia Astakhishvili and Dylan Peirce’s 2025 two-channel video work in so many things I’d like to tell you]], the sound of the construction claw [in Selma Selman’s 2024 sculpture Flower of Life], and then, every four minutes, Klara Liden’s sign [the 2024 sculpture Untitled (Haltestelle)] rotates. There are machine sounds that are also repetitive in a particular way that creates this evocative rhythm. The sounds speak to a quality that is hard to put into language, but which is something that exhibitions and art can do.

It seemed like the space really allows the works to breathe, and that there’s not an overabundance of text. Was that an intentional choice in the curation?

There are many artists that could be in this show, but [these 14 artists] was also an important scale for me in terms of this being a big show, with substantial works and investment made in those works. But I also wanted there to be room [for audiences] to understand individual practices too, and to have space to approach those practices. There’s hopefully space for a meaningful encounter with each of these artists. And it was important that the works in the show are impactful, not illustrative of ideas. They speak for themselves. Context is also important. When you work on any show, you know about the artists’ work and, for some of the artists, I’ve actually worked with them previously, or I’ve been following their practices internationally [for years]. There aren’t many [opportunities] to really dig into individual practices sometimes and I think there is a meaning that emerges when you see these works in context.

Earlier you mentioned that there is an abundance of not just waste, but information. And there is of course a lot of art these days that is explicitly political. But it seemed like the works in “The Gatherers” are not necessarily political, even if their context is, and they merely demonstrating or illustrating a state of affairs.

I think that art is at its best when it responds to and reflects qualities of a time in ways that other medias and formats don’t or can’t. It’s important to maintain that. So, in terms of the political, there’s a lot of different ways you could approach that. The artists [in “The Gatherers”] have strategies of pulling from, extracting, and intervening that they use to speak about certain issues, but it’s really through the language of creative practice. There are ways that can be compelling or not compelling. But these artists do something more than just tell a story.

They do something that only art can do.

I feel more and more adamant about that, because there’s a lot of expectation for art to do things that art maybe never has really done and it doesn’t necessarily lead to anything that great or interesting. It’s like asking all literature to operate in one specific way. Art can be incredibly valid, powerful, reflective and thought provoking and we, as viewers, need to allow space, room, and some sort of generosity to allow that to happen. Art can open perspectives in ways that aren’t necessarily so literal. Otherwise, it gets boring.