Oxidation as Slow Violence within Domestic Infrastructures

Curated by Ieva Bendziute

Art Gallery 13, Bishop’s Stortford

11 September – 13 October 2022

The Rust Room, on view at Art Gallery 13 in Bishop’s Stortford, curated by Ieva Bendziute, offers the most incisive articulation yet of Ilja Nabutovskis’ sculptural vocabulary of collapse. In this exhibition, radiators — one of the most recurring objects in his practice — are meticulously disassembled into corroded fragments. Brackets, bolts, valves, fins, and plates are arranged in measured rows across the gallery floor, with two radiators, one intact and one partially broken, leaning mutely against the walls. The arrangement resembles at once an archaeological grid and a forensic staging, where evidence is not preserved but laid bare as material testimony.

The pigment of rust dominates the installation. Its reddish bloom is not incidental but structural, a chemistry of oxidation that testifies to time’s attrition. Nabutovskis does not present the radiator as nostalgic relic or metaphorical ruin. Instead, he foregrounds rust itself as protagonist — a slow agent of erosion, an elemental inscription of breakdown. The installation becomes a chamber where corrosion speaks not as surface accident but as substance, pigment, and atmosphere.

This gesture connects directly to the American cultural theorist Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” — destruction that is incremental, invisible, yet devastating across time. Rust embodies this temporality perfectly: a violence that never erupts spectacularly but accumulates imperceptibly, a process of material exhaustion that carries political as well as aesthetic weight. In The Rust Room, slow violence is staged not at the level of catastrophe but at the level of chemistry, through iron’s ceaseless dialogue with oxygen and moisture.

Earlier in the summer of 2022, Nabutovskis had exhibited a different facet of his practice in the group show CARC LAB/2022: The Alchemy of Media at Atticus Art Gallery, Bath. His contribution there — a large-format analogue photograph derived from Cold Water Repairs — revealed thawing radiators as spectral apparitions. Shot on long exposure, the photograph collapsed condensation, steel, and shadow into a blurred surface that held time as attrition rather than event. If Bath emphasised entropy as image, The Rust Room presents entropy as matter: corrosion crystallised into sculptural fragments. Both works reveal Nabutovskis’ refusal to treat entropy as metaphor. Instead, it is his medium, the ground through which material and memory register.

In the Anglo-American critical context, Nabutovskis’ radiators converse with broader debates on infrastructures as aesthetic and political objects. Tim Edensor, writing on industrial ruins, has observed that rust demonstrates “the ceaseless process of material becoming”, undermining fantasies of stability. Nabutovskis offers this process in condensed form: once cohesive radiators are now dispersed into fragments, their promise of circulation stripped away. The radiator — a domestic organ of warmth — has become a scattered archive of oxidation.

His approach also resonates with Jane Bennett’s philosophy of “vibrant matter”, in which nonhuman materials act with their own agency. In The Rust Room, rust is not passive evidence but active participant. It creeps, spreads, and infiltrates, asserting itself as a material force in the gallery. The radiator may no longer circulate heat, but its oxidation circulates atmosphere. The viewer does not simply observe decay; they are enveloped by its reddish ambience.

Comparisons with contemporary UK artists sharpen the contours of Nabutovskis’ project. Cornelia Parker’s exploded objects, suspended mid-air, capture the spectacle of destruction as frozen tableau. Nabutovskis’ dismantling is quieter, slower, more forensic: corrosion instead of explosion, attrition instead of drama. Rachel Whiteread’s casts of domestic interiors monumentalise absence, translating the everyday into solid, monumental form. Nabutovskis operates in the inverse register — he disperses solidity, refusing the monumental in favour of fragment, dust, and stain. Both reveal the domestic as haunted by memory, but Nabutovskis insists that such memory is unstable, eroding, fragile.

Across the Atlantic, echoes can be heard with Theaster Gates’ work with salvaged building materials. Gates reconfigures discarded matter into socially charged installations that carry histories of community and resilience. Nabutovskis’ fragments, by contrast, resist recuperation. They are not redeemed as resources but left in their exhausted state. Their agency lies not in being reclaimed but in the quiet insistence of rust itself. Similarly, Mark Dion’s pseudo-scientific displays resonate with the forensic arrangement of radiator parts. Yet Dion’s installations often parody the authority of museum taxonomies, while Nabutovskis dwells in the fragility of infrastructures without parody: the fragments are not props but scars.

Theorist Lauren Berlant’s notion of “the attrition of the present” offers another lens. Berlant speaks of endurance not as overcoming but as slow wearing-down, where survival is improvised rather than assured. The Rust Room is precisely an installation of attrition. The radiator has not exploded or collapsed; it has rusted, fragment by fragment, until only corrosion remains. The work stages endurance as fragility: a holding-together that is always already a falling-apart.

This sensibility aligns Nabutovskis with UK artists such as Mike Nelson, whose immersive environments constructed from detritus present histories of labour, ruin, and fragility. Nelson often builds fictionalised ruins; Nabutovskis, by contrast, works with infrastructural reality. The radiator is not a fictional prop but a lived object of survival, one now presented in its broken state. The distinction is crucial: Nabutovskis does not simulate entropy — he inhabits it.

His work also resonates with the legacy of American artist Gordon Matta-Clark, whose architectural cuts revealed the fragility of built structures by slicing them open. Where Matta-Clark dramatised rupture, Nabutovskis dismantles quietly, piece by piece, aligning with chemistry rather than incision. The radiator fragments are not violently cut but slowly undone, their form eroded by time’s own tools.

Curator Ieva Bendziute frames The Rust Room as infrastructural archaeology. The careful arrangement of fragments recalls excavation sites, where artefacts are laid out for classification. Yet here the classification is futile. The radiator will not be reassembled, the system will not return to circulation. Instead, the fragments mark the impossibility of permanence. The installation is at once scientific and poetic: a taxonomy of corrosion, a choreography of failure.

Rust, in this context, is pigment and politics alike. It stains the gallery as surely as it stains memory. It speaks of abandonment but also of persistence, for even in oxidation the radiator endures as trace. This ambivalence distinguishes Nabutovskis’ approach from ruin romanticism. He does not mourn decay nor glorify it. He arranges it, presenting corrosion as condition rather than metaphor.

By situating dismantled radiators within a British gallery, Nabutovskis continues his project of translating post-Soviet residues into new contexts. In the UK, rust no longer indexes only Eastern collapse; it destabilises the presumed stability of Western infrastructures. The radiator becomes a universal object, its corrosion a reminder that permanence is everywhere precarious. Here one might recall Elizabeth Povinelli’s reflections on endurance: that living is less about transcending breakdown than inhabiting it. Nabutovskis stages precisely this endurance, aligning fragments not to repair them, but to acknowledge their fragile persistence.

In Anglo-American critical discourse, infrastructures have become increasingly visible as sites of political and aesthetic investigation. Nabutovskis joins this conversation not by monumentalising infrastructure but by dismantling it into evidence of attrition. His radiators are not symbols of collapse but embodiments of slow violence: corrosion as process, rust as witness.

The power of The Rust Room lies in its precision. Each fragment is aligned carefully, not scattered randomly. The orderliness intensifies the sense of fragility: even in careful arrangement, the pieces cannot reconnect. They remain apart, evidence of a system that once circulated but now lies inert. The viewer encounters not ruin as spectacle but ruin as condition, staged with clinical calm.

As a continuation of Nabutovskis’ practice, The Rust Room reaffirms his commitment to entropy-as-method. From condensation fogging archives to cement constrained by plastic bottles, and now to radiators undone by rust, he insists that infrastructures are not stable but fragile ecologies, always already eroding. His works articulate a poetics of attrition: quiet, unspectacular, intimate, yet unrelenting.

In The Rust Room, permanence is revealed as fiction. Rust becomes both material and meaning, chemistry and critique. Nabutovskis shows that collapse is not a sudden catastrophe but a slow saturation of matter by time. His dismantled radiators testify not only to the fragility of domestic infrastructure but to the fragility of permanence itself.

The installation leaves us with a proposition that extends beyond sculpture: that oxidation is the form through which the present writes its memory, and that living within infrastructures today means living within their slow undoing.

 Tom Denman, residing in London, is a distinguished freelance art critic whose perceptive articles have featured in eminent publications such as Art Journal, ART PAPERS, ArtReview, Art Monthly, Burlington Contemporary, e-flux, Flash Art, Ocula, and Studio International. He earned his PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Reading, focusing his research on Caravaggio and the noble-intellectual milieu of seventeenth-century Naples. Presently, his critiques primarily explore the subtleties and emerging trends within contemporary art.