> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://arts-of-the-working-class.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Solar Excess - URL: https://arts-of-the-working-class.ghost.io/text/review-hamburg-city-curators-exhibition-fire-at-the-st-nikolai-memorial/ - Published: 2026-08-19T00:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-02T21:18:50.000Z - Description: On the Capitalist Relation to Nature in Hamburg City Curator’s Exhibition “Fire” at the St. Nikolai Memorial. - Author: Nils Fock - Tags: #silverstripe As the product of a historical externalization serving the purpose of accumulation, capitalist nature is mediated through an epistemic separation. This gives rise not only to the fallacy of the ontological independence of the society reproducing this relation, but also to the reduction of nonhuman life to a resource usable at will. “\[T\]o break this cycle of destruction and renewal”\[1\] is the horizon of the group exhibition “Fire”, on view through September 21, 2026, at the St. Nikolai memorial, a gothic church ruin in the heart of Hamburg. The emergence of the sun, popularly conceived of as a giant ball of fire, animates this rupture. The prevalence of this blinding experience becomes palpable upon an initial passage through the open expanse of the former church nave. A parabolic mirror, glistening, draws the eyes upward toward the eastern side of the remaining church tower: Outside the museum’s climate-controlled confines, the sun’s reflection in Saodat Ismailova’s *Melted into the Sun* (2026) lets the origin of the permeating heat seep through another register of sensory perception into general consciousness to devour it from within. The beam effortlessly corrodes the mediation of the hierarchical binary relation of human and nonhuman nature. For the energy given by the sun, the condition of possibility for life on Earth, cannot be exhaustively subjugated to the logic of accumulation that determines the spirit of this relation. Solar energy exceeds the limits of valorization, only to be repudiated under the phantasm of endless economic growth, yet ever recurring—albeit habitually destructive in capitalist embodiment by force of reproduced exclusion. Against the restriction of the sun’s gift— a restriction through which humanity elevates itself to an ontological exception—Ismailova executes an inversion. Through the primacy of the sun, which the artist renders tangible, nature is turned from a subordinate exterior into a superordinate center toward which a relation can be posited, whose blossoming, however, unfurls beyond capitalist domination. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/09/Nikita-Kadan-Tryhova-the-Sirens-and-the-Mast-2023-Foto-Daria-Kulnina.jpg) Nikita Kadan, *Tryhova \[the Sirens and the Mast\]*, 2023 © Foto Daria Kulnina This eccentricity of the human—the surpassing of the habit of conceiving oneself as the superior center—is further propelled by the ascent to the tower’s crown. Beyond the threshold constituted by the headphones installed at various points throughout the observation tower, awaits the composition *Tryhova (The Sirens and the Mast)* (2023) by Nikita Kadan, poised to afflict the sense of hearing. The title translates from Ukrainian as both “anxiety” and “air raid alarm” and is, as such, at once a promise of the experiential content to come. The piece arises from a recording of an air raid alarm, with which first a violin and, finally, a mezzo-soprano interfere, following the sirens into the death of habit signified by their wailing. The provenance of this passage is the powerlessness of sustaining what has become second nature, that is, to be forced to leave behind the material conditions of life. Being torn away from habit-fostering second nature at a height of 76 meters, overlooking the vastness of Hamburg, indeed merely amounts to letting oneself be haunted by the specter of one’s own impossibility, but it also brings about further devotion to the engulfing radiance of the sun. The reprise of Georges Bataille’s designation of the transsubjective course of the corresponding experience shines forth as imperative: “The seething I glare into, the seething that stirs the globe, is my seething as well.” \[2\] ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/09/Hala-Alnaji-Nazeh-Exhibition-2023-on-Foto-Daria-Kulnina-1.jpg) Hala Alnaji, Nazeh Exhibition, 2023-on © Foto Daria Kulnina The fervent sacrifice of human supremacy to the sun exceeds mere ecological reversal. Withdrawn from the rays undermining habit arising from second nature, the installation *Nazeh* (2023–ongoing) by Hala Alnaji finds shelter in the cellar of the monument. Created in collaboration with Palestinians who had to flee Gaza for Cairo and then Berlin, a map, engraved on 32 charred Valchromat panels measuring 8 x 2.4 meters in total recuperates a history cast into darkness. Rendered in the Latin alphabet and translatable as “the displaced”, *Nazeh* (Arabic: نازح) brings to light the standpoint from which lives resisting annihilation stitch together a medium of revivification through the reconstructive mapping of urban infrastructure and the built environment of Gaza City. The nothingness from which the excavated vestiges emerge further settles in the ashen dust that, over the course of the exhibition, falls from the vault onto the fire-scarred reconstitution on the floor, bringing into view the afterlife of what has been destroyed in an elusive, indecipherable guise. The West, from which the capitalist relation to nature expands across the globe, blinds itself, through the reduction of human and nonhuman nature to a fungible resource, to life that refuses to yield to its abstract form. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/09/1_Saodat-Ismailova-Melted-into-the-Sun-2026-Installation-Foto-Daria-Kulnina.jpg) Saodat Ismailova, *Melted into the Sun*, 2026, Installation © Foto Daria Kulnina “Emerging from nature, why did we become separated from it?” The nexus between the West and the abstraction of life, too, is evoked by a veiled figure posing this question in Ismailova’s video work *Melted into the Sun* (2024), adjacent to Alnaji's installation. The film, which bears the same title as the parabolic mirror that later reveals itself as the film’s prop, revolves around Al-Muqanna, who in eighth-century Central Asia, preached a solar politics emanating from the veneration of the sun. The prophet’s acephalic appearance—dispossessed of the habitation of spirit in which the human turned itself into the center of nature—is an eccentering of the human by undercutting its authoritarian self-aggrandizement over (human and nonhuman) life through a parabolic selflessness that lets itself go as the plaything of solar energy, hence Al-Muqanna’s proclamation: “There is no distance between me and the sun.” The upending of human exceptionalism takes its departure in a traversal through the history of solar energy’s manifestations in non-Western societies,from the sacred river Amu Darya and the Zoroastrian burial site of Chilpiq, via the city of Bukhara (where, according to legend, the sun radiates not from above but out of the city itself) to the monumental solar furnace of Parkent—an upending unfolding against the anthropocentrism for whose violent imposition Europe colonized the entire planet. “What was worshipped in earlier times is now supposed to be subordinated. Breaking this circle is a matter of solar politics,” writes Oxana Timofeeva in *Solar Politics* (2022), a plea for reclaiming, with Bataille, the principle of the sun for the political economy of the present. Yet the actualization of solar politics would not result in a mere exchange of positions within the binary-hierarchical relation between human and nature, but rather in the overcoming of the antagonistic positioning of the relata: the liberation of the energy given by the sun, the condition of possibility for life on Earth, from the determination of nature as a means to the end of economic growth is at once the liberation of the energy exceeding the logic of accumulation for ends without use, having been excluded on account of this very uselessness for the purpose of economic growth. Were planetary energy organized in following the sun, the reproduction of the capitalist relation to nature in which the human being rises to ontological culmination would be rendered senseless—the excess experienced in the sun, not spirit, determining nature. This would, to quote Bataille “in fact bring about a Copernican shift, turning thought and morality upside down.” The nature of solar politics is anti-capitalist. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/09/Agnes-Denes-Sunflower-Fields-Stadtpark-Hamburg-2025-curated-by-City-Curator-Hamburg-Foto-Lashproduction.jpg) Agnes Denes, *Sunflower Fields*, Stadtpark Hamburg, 2025, curated by City Curator Hamburg © Foto Lashproduction In this regard, the realization of Agnes Denes’s *Sunflower Fields* is particularly noteworthy. The installation, by a pioneer of ecological art, comprising hundreds of sunflowers, claims Hammaburg Square, the hotbed of Hamburg’s history: out of the Hammaburg, which was built around the year 800, the city took root and flourished. This iteration of *Wheatfield—A Confrontation*, realized originally in 1982, for which the artist planted a two-acre wheatfield on a landfill site across from Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, has retained its confrontational nature more than 40 years later. The historical rootstock of Hamburg is being cultivated by the spirit of encroaching capital under the revealing label “business improvement district”. The efforts of the City Curator Hamburg team, backed by public authorities and foundations, to let the sun guide the city’s pivotal point, turn this enterprise on its head. The sunflowers were not planted to be a means to an end governed by the principle of usefulness—for instance, in keeping with capitalist habit for oil production or the like—but for the useless tracing of their heliotropism. “Watch, listen, participate,” Denes prescribes. “We all can be like sunflowers—grow, nourish, endow others with our richness, turn to the sun, then reflect its warmth to all living creatures.” The experienced rupture of the second-natured (re)production of first nature in the form of a warehouse of fungible units is not merely exhausted in a “reflection” of this historical determination of nature, still less in an ostensible reconciliation of the antagonism that is concomitant with this determination. Rather, the stare from the center of the city toward the sun exceeds the epistemic separation through which nature is mediated—(solar) madness in the eyes of Western anthropocentrism. In distinction to ordinary eco-exhibitions, in which the very positing of nature that was supposed to be challenged ends up being reproduced, “Fire” offers an experience that actually runs counter to the capitalist relation to nature. // --- ### Footnotes \[1\] Taken from the thematic introduction to the exhibition, https://stadtkuratorin-hamburg.de/en/projects/five-years-five-elements/fire \[2\] Georges Bataille, *La Part Maudite* \[1949\]. Vol. 11 of Œuvres complètes in twelve volumes, ed. Francis Marmande and Sibylle Monod, 17-179\. Paris: (Gallimard, 1976), 20. Cover Image: Saodat Ismailova, *Melted into the Sun*, 2024\. Film still © Saodat Ismailova *Nils Fock is a PhD candidate at the HFBK Hamburg and the Institute for Social Research under the supervision of Juliane Rebentisch and Christoph Menke with the thesis “Abject Nature. A theory of contemporary art after Georges Bataille.”*