MoMA PS1 Presents ‘The Gatherers’ to the City Handling Its Shit

At MoMA PS1, under the numbing buzz of a photocopier and the occasional grinding noises of a blossoming construction claw, visitors are met with a sea of garbage they must wade through to enter the building. Their current show, The Gatherers, examines waste by presenting fourteen artists who, by extracting, collecting, and mutating trash into new forms, highlight both insufficiencies and possibilities in waste management while underscoring the temporality of human life compared to some long-lasting materials. Open through October 6th, I encourage you to see this exhibition early, or your visit will be accompanied by a stink (one that surely will match your consumption and waste habits).

In New York, new mandated composting laws went into effect on April 1, including a “curbside composting” program that accompanies the pre-existing smart composting bins throughout the city. According to the most recent Waste Characterization Study, roughly one-third of the material collected by the Department of Sanitation in New York is compostable. Under the new laws, organic waste is distributed to Staten Island, where it becomes compost safe for gardening that New Yorkers can pick up in one of the city’s give-back programs, or it heads to Newton Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant, a waste management site just one stop away from MoMA PS1 on the G-train, where it is turned into biogas to power homes. Unfortunately, the new mandate has been met with some resistance, despite New York City being far behind cities like Seattle and San Francisco that have managed to divert 80% of their waste from going into landfills. New Yorkers, we can do better.

The Gatherers is perhaps one of the few instances where the volume of trash available could be seen as a benefit. Improperly disposed waste might fall into the dexterous hands of professional rummager Ser Serpas, a visual artist who collects trash and repurposes it into temporarily installed sculptures. For The Gatherers, her contributions consist of a delicately perched and “modded out” shopping cart, the inside of which is lined with foam insulation and an unfinished Heath Bar. “I hate wasting a drop of pretty much anything,” said Serpas. “If I collect seventy objects in a week or two, I’ll dump them out properly again when I’m done.” Her work is an imaginative reinvention of the power within found objects, creating anthropomorphic figures or constructing physical narratives throughout the room.

Serpas contributed seven sculptures to the exhibition, all sourced on site. “Waste here is a bit flimsier than in other places I’ve dealt with, so I have to look under train tracks and places where people are more likely to dump what I consider grail objects that are sturdier,” she said. Part of the intrigue is the situational aspect of the works, from the organic positioning, or the authentic half-eaten candy, Serpas jokingly warned that it’s best to see this exhibit early to avoid the potential rotting smell that could develop.

The transformation of waste, organic or otherwise, has endless possibilities. Bosnian artist Selma Selman, a self-described transformer and lifelong scavenger, dismantles old technology to harvest and recycle the central processing units into gold. “It took me two years to find a way, and this is a secret that I’m not going to share with anybody,” she said. Nail (2025) is a piece of hardware gilded with material extracted from Motherboards, a performance with her brother and cousin, where they completed this dismantling process live, accompanied by electronic music and verified by a chemical engineer. The nail is alone on a blank wall, “holding nothing, but at the same time it’s holding everything,” said Selman. Her work is paramount in the importance of salvaging resources beyond their inherent purposes.

For some pieces, neither reconstruction nor reinvention is required to make a profound statement. In dark days, by Tolia Astakhishvilia, a cement tunnel of trinkets and varied junk “functions like a sieve that catches materials and objects that are passing through time,” said Ruba Katrib, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at MoMA PS1. The brutalist exterior protects an interior portal; it’s an accumulation of objects cemented in a conjoined existence, a reality where their value relies on each other, removing preciousness from each particular item, and descending into a glittering oblivion. Astakhishvilia also contributed the omniscient two-channel video, so many things I’d like to tell you (2025), a perpetual carousel of consumption from plastic-lined prosciutto, a writhing worm, scanned textbook pages of Jupiter, and large piles of ash. The hypnotizing screens wipe left to right, feeding eyes with a limitless frenzy of opportunity, forcing a contemplation of greed, desire, and periphery.

A nod to how city planners might guide dwellers, architectural environments are also present in the exhibition, especially in Klara Lidén’s blank signage, which, in the gallery setting, appears monumental. Her tongue-in-cheek artistic oeuvre also includes garbage cans sourced, probably stolen, from public spaces in different cities. Stripped bare, the ready-made piece reinforces the object’s functionality: to influence the behaviour of its users. 

Last year, 311 fielded 41,023 complaints related to waste, many of which the garbage heaps on sidewalks that may linger for days. “[DSNY] collects roughly 24 million pounds of residential trash and recycling every day,” press secretary Vincent Gragnani wrote in an email to Cultbytes. Flowering and Fading is a film that explores the power dynamics between living things through a story that breaks the laws of physics and transforms domesticity into a nightmare. This contribution from Andro Eradze depicts a mouse that lives in the limbo of wilderness and civilization, representing an underlying theme in many of the pieces throughout the exhibition, how rodents subsist amidst a world filled with garbage. There are roughly three million rats in New York City, part of the reason why laws around waste have changed in the last few years. “Two years ago, we did not have any rules requiring that this trash be in containers, and now 70 percent is required, so we are making enormous strides in a short period,” Gragnani continued.

The Gatherers remind us of the flaws of thoughtless consumption and failures of attending to our waste. In tandem with new policies like composting or extracting valuable minerals like Selman, the exhibition nods to an abundance of options in dealing with waste. There is hope for a future where nature and our civilization are no longer at odds.

The Gatherers is on view at MoMA PS1 from April 24 through October 6, 2025.

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