New Mineral Collective (Tanya Busse and Emilija Škarnulytė) is concerned with the intersection of nature, materiality, and human practice. The collective takes an investigative approach to landscapes, minerals, and processes as both geological and cultural phenomena, exploring how raw materials shape our aesthetics, technologies, and ways of being in the world. The artists examine the relationship between land and body, and the desire to “extract” through pleasure rather than destruction.
For Bringing In The Tide, they expand their ongoing practice of intervening in the politics of landscape through sculptural and geological imagination, in order to better understand the nature and extent of human interaction with the Earth’s surface. The work can be seen as a kind of new navigational tool—but also as a critical device. It encourages the viewer to rethink their desires and move away from a mindset in which nature is primarily exploited for profit, instead inviting new, more sustainable ways of being part of the planet.
At the same time, the work establishes a connection between the body and the sea, reminding us that our individual habits and rituals are intertwined with the condition of the Earth—that the way we care for ourselves is also reflected in the health of the planet.
BIO
New Mineral Collective is a collaboration between Emilija Škarnulytė (b. 1987, Lithuania) and Tanya Busse (b. 1982, Canada), established in 2021 and based in Trondheim. Like an organism, they infiltrate the extractive industries with alternative forces such as desire, bodily extraction, and acts of resistance.
Their works have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the SIART Bolivia International Art Biennial; Artists’ Film International Season 7, organised by the Whitechapel Gallery; the inaugural Toronto Art Biennial; SeMA Seoul Museum of Art; On Earth, Structure and Sadness at the Serpentine Galleries, UK; ArkDes, the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design, Stockholm; Swimming Pool: Troubled Waters at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; and more recently at Mercer Union, Toronto, and Salzburg Kunstverein, Austria.