Sugar: Industrial Heritage and Colonialism, < rotor > – Centre for Contemporary Art, Graz

The political implications of sugar extraction is the subject of the exhibition Sugar: Industrial Heritage and Colonialism, negotiating its complicated history and questioning its conflictual presence today. The investigated time frame starts at the beginning of colonialization, moving on to the continental blockade of the Napoleonic era and providing an introduction of sugar made from the beet over two turbulent centuries before arriving at the current late-capitalist stage with a prospect of bioplastic and the biofuel ethanol produced in Brazil. Curated by the institution’s leading duo Anton Lederer and Margarethe Makovec, the exhibition features fourteen artistic positions, many using photographic means.

It opens in the first room with broad historical issues related to the early days of sugar production. Questions of colonialism and racism are taken up in the seven black-and-white photographs documenting a performance by the Brazilian artist Alessandra dos Santos in which she—dressed in a black colonial costume with her face darkened— vomits a viscous white mixture up. The title 1452 and Before?! (2015) references the papal bull that authorized the King of Portugal to subjugate lands along the coast of West Africa, which laid the foundation for the Atlantic slave trade while underscoring male sovereignty and religious faith at the verge of the gruesome colonial area. Ferenc Gróf takes up the battle between sugar cane and the sugar beet. In Code Sucre (Sugar Code, 2020), he combined three drawings by the French artist and caricaturist Honoré Daumier with sixteen pages from the Code Noir (Black Code) passed by King Louis XIV in 1685, defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire until its abolishment in 1848. The Zagreb-based collective Fokus Grupa investigates the first Austro-Hungarian sugar factory, which was founded in 1750 in the port city of Rijeka and already pointed toward the empire to come: set against light-blue walls, the installation shows three life-size reproductions of salon paintings depicting idealized landscapes with splendid architecture, gigantic sailing ships, and imaginary scenes (Vedutas from the Palace of the Privileged Company of Trieste and Fiume, Rijeka, 2020–21), including racialized enslaved people hinting at the workforce enabling industrialized sugar-making.

For the exhibition, the curators have commissioned several works to investigate local sugar production. Those projects are positioned in adjoining spaces. Elisabeth Gschiel’s work links to the period of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as she explored the history of the Graz-based K.u.k. Privilegierte Zuckerraffinerie (Privileged Sugar Refinery), founded in 1821 and shut down in 1881, and how it disappeared from local collective memory. This was also the period of early photography. Gschiel responds to this fact by using the proto-photographic procedure of cyanotype when unfolding archival materials. With Inheritance Back (2021), a seven-part series of meticulously hand-colored photographs of home-grown sugar beets, Resa Pernthaller responds to the family venture of her grandfather’s syrup factory in Fohnsdorf, which only existed for two years (1947–49). The petite vitrine displaying archival material reveals the enterprise’s local importance after the Second World War in responding to the misery of the village population’s food shortage, albeit concurrently being at the mercy of unequal market conditions, which led to insolvency. A more recent and likewise turbulent history of sugar production is unfolded in Isa Rosenberger’s Sugar Campaign (2021). In a video lecture, the artist chronologically narrates the story of the Austrian sugar factory in Enns (1928–88) by concurrently pointing toward sociopolitical conditions, sharing archival materials on stage in the building of the former factory, which has since been transformed into an arts center.

The show views the sugar industry as a global issue and points to a different continent: Samuel Ferretto’s sculptural work Guardanapo (Napkin, 2020), made of biologically produced plastic, refers to the demand for sugar as a raw material in the future. Since Jair Bolsonaro became Brazil’s president, the increase in sugar cane cultivation has had enormous destructive effects on the Amazon region. The form of the sculptural work, its translucent envelopes, calls for transparency.

At the core of the exhibition lies Ilona Németh’s wide-ranging project Eastern Sugar (2017–21), which initiated the Graz-based show. Taking its point of departure in previous projects on nationalism and populism, Németh investigates the broad sociopolitical implications of sugar production starting in Slovakia’s most significant sugar-processing plant, located in the artist’s hometown of Dunajská Streda. Through different collaborations, and highlighting varying aspects, Németh has been showing and working on this ongoing artistic research project in five other countries. The title Eastern Sugar stems from the sign of the now-demolished sugar factory with only the abandoned office building left. The plant in Dunajská Streda was operating from 1969 through 2006: after the fall of the socialist regime and with the arrival of capitalism came the takeover of the facility by French and British multinationals, the rebranding, and, finally, the dismantling to take advantage of a compensation scheme by the European Union. Departing from here, the artist explores sugar production all over Slovakia (and, further, in its neighboring countries), emphasizing that eight out of ten factories still in operation at the fall of communism are closed today. Raluca Voinea writes: “Together they represent a concise time capsule through which to remember and perhaps better understand the crude form that global capitalism took in this part of the world . . . In some cases, their simple dismissal was not enough, as happened to the Eastern Sugar factory, where disappearance from the face of the earth was required as part of the arrangement: not only was it meant to cease existence, but it had to guarantee that it will never exist again” (p. 138). Driven by the question “What has emerged in the place of lost factories and positions?” (p. 25), Ilona Németh builds a comprehensive archive and applies a range of practices to convey the turbulent times of the neoliberal transition, thereby working with the last remnants of the factory before their complete disappearance. Taking up an archival impulse, the installation of an interactive hanging depot system is used for showing, in an overlapping way, large-format photographs (in collaboration with Olja Triaška Stefanović) from the ruins of different sugar companies and wasteland areas. On two screens and in two opposing narratives, former management representatives and a former worker lay out their various roles during the decline of the sugar factory. Coming from an inherently political and subversive feminist artistic practice, in 2020 the artist declared the chimney’s ruins of the former sugar factory in Pohronský Ruskov to be a national cultural monument. The actual process labor involved in sugar-making is addressed by her installation of a small sugarloaf manufacture that invites visitors to engage with the sensual experience of this dated practice of sugarloaf-making and to take their workpiece home—and with it the global concatenation of exploitations and extractions that urges us to rethink our understanding of being in the world.