Haboob

The displacement and detournement of the different uses of everyday objects is central to the art practice of David Posth-Kohler. In his work, objects are moved around and shifted until they create a poetic space of their own, filled in with equally personal and fable-like narratives. These narratives usually revolve around the relation between our immediate urban environment and the natural world. In much of his work, the organisation and rapport between these worlds- the urban with its heavy movement of capital and products and the natural, simultaneously alien and sublime- is in permanent tension and constitutes one of the most important themes in his practice.
A good example of this is "cérémiques en sac à dos", were the artist produce a series of portable ceramic sculptures in the form of common rugsacks that he later used to climb the mountain of Annapurnas in Nepal. The bags are then presented as the product of a sculptural process that began with an ordinary object but is now infused with the experience of an adventure-performance held in the realm of the ‘outside’ world.

It is also in this context that we can inscribe "Haboob" (2013-2016) or sandstorm in arabic. The sculpture consist of a long vitrine filled with sand. Inside the vitrine there are three helices that are activated randomly, creating an unexpected whirlwind of sand moving in all directions inside a contained space. Hypnotic and frenetic in equal measure, Haboob is an artificial natural disorder meant to represent an instant of ‘out-doors’ chaos or flux inside a vitrine, which is a museographical dispositive commonly use to display objects associated with the world of humanities (ethnography, art, archaeology, etc).