Nick Mangan (AU)

Born in 1979, Geelong, Australia
Lives and works in Melbourne

Nick Mangan generates intriguing narratives around objects and places through an amalgam of fact and fiction.

For this exhibition Mangan exhibits a new work ‘Nauru: Notes From a Cretaceous World’ (2009), which was filmed on the island of Nauru in the Pacific Ocean. The history of Nauru, the world’s smallest country at 21km2, reads like a science fiction story combining environmental exploitation, financial speculation and corruption, fantastic wealth and near poverty.

After the island was discovered to hold a vast deposit of phosphate in the early twentieth century, it became heavily mined to meet the demands of farmers in Australia, New Zealand and Europe for Super Phosphate, an agricultural fertiliser used to improve soil quality and crop productivity. Nauru’s natural phosphate resource is almost entirely depleted and the island is now faced with serious social, economic and environmental challenges.

Mangan’s work is shown alongside Bright Ugochukwu Eke’s ‘Acid Rain’ installation in the CBK  ’s-Hertogenbosch, an art centre located in the former Willem II Cigarenfabriek (Willem II Cigar Factory) in ‘s-Hertogenbosch. Within this industrial context, the two works prompt a reflection on the near and far reaching consequences of industrial processes.