23 Mar 2026
Salt, Data, and Deep Time of Kristina Õllek
Interviewby Alexander Burenkov
The practice of Estonian artist Kristina Õllek unfolds at the unstable intersections of ecology, materiality, and post-digital culture. Working across photography, sculpture, and installation, Õllek investigates environments shaped by both natural processes and technological intervention, dissolving distinctions between fact and fiction, the synthetic and the organic, the copy and the original. Her works do not merely represent ecosystems; they enact them, allowing matter itself to participate in the production of meaning.
Central to Õllek’s practice is a sustained engagement with aquatic environments, particularly the Baltic Sea. Scientific research, ecological data, and speculative narratives converge within her installations, where substances such as sea salt, cyanobacteria, limestone, and bioplastic function simultaneously as materials, metaphors, and agents. Rather than translating data into visual illustration, Õllek re-materialises knowledge. What appears seamless and abstract in digital systems — numbers, graphs, simulations — becomes fragile, granular, and temporally extended in physical form.
This movement between data and matter situates Õllek’s work firmly within the post-digital condition. In a cultural landscape where digital technologies are no longer perceived as separate from reality but embedded within ecological, economic, and bodily systems, her installations expose the hidden infrastructures underpinning contemporary life. Salt crystallisation, for instance, becomes both a geological process and a counterpoint to the accelerated temporality of digital media. Slow, unstable, and environmentally dependent, it resists the logic of immediacy, refresh, and frictionless circulation.
Õllek’s works also foreground extraction as a defining paradigm of post-digital culture. From deep-sea mining to data harvesting, she traces continuities between material and immaterial economies, revealing how technological progress remains grounded in geological and ecological disturbance. In doing so, her practice complicates the rhetoric of innovation, sustainability, and digital abstraction.
Yet Õllek’s hybrid installations, where fact and fiction, synthetic and natural, copy and original intertwine with each other and become a hybrid object/matter, are not solely critical; they are experiential propositions. Viewers are invited to navigate spaces that demand bodily awareness, duration, and sensory attention. Surfaces shift, crystallise, evaporate. Meaning accumulates rather than appears instantly. In this way, Õllek who sees herself as a “filter feeder” (not only filtering through the information but also creating her own meaning to it), reorients perception itself, proposing an encounter with the post-digital not as an invisible system, but as something sensorial, material, and deeply entangled with the physical world.
Alexander Burenkov: Many of your materials (sea-salt crystals, bioplastic, cyanobacteria, limestone) combine the organic and the synthetic. For instance, in your exhibition Waters of Hypoxic & Once Tropic, you used grown sea salt and cyanobacteria in prints and objects. In what ways does this material layering mirror or critique how digital media layers synthetic processes into natural systems (e.g., sensors, data capture, modelling)?
Kristina Õllek: By working with different materials, I explore physical layers and materialities that acquire their own agency within the work. For the past six years, I have been working with sea salt. I am drawn to it as the crystallised residue of evaporated seawater, and to its deep entanglement with aquatic environments, global ecologies, economies, and histories.
Salt has long functioned as a symbol of power, shaping geopolitics and even language: the word “salary” derives from the Latin salarium, referring to payments associated with salt in the Roman Empire. It is also fundamental to the human body, regulating fluid balance and sustaining vital biological processes. Salt purifies and preserves.
When considering digital media, it is interesting that both salt and digital systems function as preservation technologies – one biological and mineral, the other algorithmic and electromagnetic. Salt can be understood as an ancient archive, servers as contemporary ones.
Yet salt is not only metaphorically linked to technology; it is materially embedded within it. When dissolved, it separates into ions that conduct electricity, and at the planetary scale, global data flows depend on submarine fibre-optic cables laid across saline oceans. Salt crystallises slowly. Data moves at near light speed. Between them lies a spectrum of temporalities – erosion and acceleration, sediment and stream.
AB: Your earlier work Nautilus New Era (2018) explored deep-sea mining and combined fiction (Jules Verne) with robotic and industrial imaginaries. In a moment when our devices, platforms, and infrastructures are deeply networked, how do you see extraction (of minerals, data, images) functioning as a paradigm for the post-digital?
KO: In 2018, I was invited to participate in the group exhibition Ascending from the Liquid Horizon, curated by Kati Ilves at Le Lieu Unique. Since the exhibition took place in Nantes, Jules Verne immediately came to mind. I reread 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870).
Reading the book in 2018, I found it uncanny how much it seemed to comment on our present moment. The story contains many problematic elements related to colonialism, racism, and human-centered attitudes. Nonetheless, certain ideas intrigued me.
In Verne’s narrative, Captain Nemo speaks of valuable metals on the seabed, foreseeing the potential for their future exploitation. Although fictional, Verne drew on contemporary scientific knowledge. Shortly thereafter, the HMS Challenger expedition (1872–1876) documented deep-sea mineral deposits, while still considering the deep sea lifeless. This prompted me to conduct further research on deep-sea mining, and, ironically, 2018 saw new developments in the field, including the launch of the vessel Nautilus New Era by Nautilus Minerals Inc., echoing the name of Verne’s submarine in the novel.
Taking these findings into account, I explored current deep-sea research: fragile ecosystems and new species uncovered with each expedition, alongside profound ecological and ethical concerns, which stand in stark contrast to the economic and geopolitical stakes driving potential seabed mining.
Today, extraction extends beyond minerals to data. Not only the environment, but also privacy and human attention, are constantly harvested and monetised. These hidden flows and forms of violence sustain post-digital life.
AB: You critique “the age of digital hi‑tech devices” and how they reorganise presence, past, and future. How do you think your work asks viewers to slow down, to re‑experience materiality, in contrast to the speed, immediacy and disposability of digital culture?
KO: I want to give my work a sense of presence in three-dimensional physical space, with its own depth, texture, tactility, and sometimes even scent. I aim to create pieces that invite the viewer to walk around them, kneel beside them, or move closer, where new textural elements gradually reveal themselves. Many people have told me they feel tempted to lick my salt works, which I take as a great compliment.
I want viewers to experience the work physically (though, please, no licking! ha) and to slow down, truly engaging with each piece. Whenever I create a video installation, I also consider the seating as an integral part of the piece. I’m interested in creating a moment in which a person sits down, becomes aware of their body in the chair, and experiences the work through that physical presence. The seats might be very squishy and made from materials connected to the work’s theme, as in Nautilus New Era (2018), or custom-made sun loungers layered with silicone and clay, as in As the Earliest Carrier Emerges (2024, with my husband Kert Viiart-Õllek).
AB: You’ve worked with exhibition formats ranging from museums to online spaces and future archaeology. In a post‑digital world where display contexts (gallery, VR, social feed) blur, how do you consider the “format” of your work as part of its meaning?
KO: For me, format becomes both a material and conceptual exploration. With each exhibition, the work adapts to its specific environment and can be perceived differently. In a post-digital world, boundaries blur, and works begin to circulate on their own terms.
During my master’s (2014–2016), my practice was deeply engaged with questions of how works rematerialize in digital spaces and emerge as new entities. In 2017, together with Kert Viiart-Õllek, we created an exhibition on Instagram named as @exhibit_onscroll. We were interested in critically exploring Instagram as an exhibition format, using its three-column grid to shape the viewer’s experience and mirror the platform’s typical logic. The exhibition consisted of 321 Instagram posts, which we divided into four “installments” throughout February 2017. Each time, we uploaded approximately 60–90 posts, carefully considering Instagram traffic and prime posting hours. Each installment usually took 30 minutes to an hour, and the large number of posts temporarily dominated our followers’ feeds. Although Instagram already had rules limiting how many posts could be published per day/hour, we were only blocked twice during the entire process.
We decided to keep @exhibit_onscroll exhibition “open” on Instagram as long as a three-column grid view exists. However, last year (2025), the platform changed its profile grid from square to rectangular, effectively reformatting the show. In 2020, when we were invited to participate in the Riga Photography Biennial, we created a video work that became a guided-walk-view of @exhibit_onscroll, which has since this change, become the primary way to experience the work. The piece continues to exist on its “original” platform, but this new format highlights how works circulate, adapt, and acquire new modes of presence in post-digital contexts.
AB: The sea salt growing through your prints (for example, in Absorbing Hypoxic Sea Water, 2023) responds to time, evaporation and environmental change. How does this temporal materiality – slow, weathered, evolving – operate in tension with digital media’s rapid update‑loops and ephemeral feed culture?
KO: The process of growing sea salt onto my works holds a unique significance for me – it becomes a collaboration, depending also on the season, temperature, humidity, and other environmental and physical conditions. It is a very slow process, taking months, requiring a lot of work and patience. At the same time, it’s also about letting go of control and being open to the uncontrollable.
Whereas digital platforms privilege immediacy, constant refresh, and accelerated visibility, the crystallization of salt insists on duration, accumulation, and environmental dependency. The surface does not “update” instantly; it transforms gradually, foregrounding slowness, fragility and change over time. It’s a counter-practice.
AB: Your piece PoweredBy (2020) addresses “green” metaphorical value and cyanobacteria, highlighting how the colour green and renewable imagery can conceal extractive logics. In post‑digital culture where the veneer of technology masks underlying systems, how do you use material and visual strategies to reveal, subvert or re‑frame that veneer?
KO: Within my practice, I am drawn to materials that carry their own charged meanings, allowing me to speculate through and with them. I use these materials as carriers of multi-layered meanings in order to reframe the ideological veneer.
The installation Powered By featured a central fountain filled with bright green water, loosely resembling a hydrothermal vent. Instead of hot water, however, it emitted a luminous green liquid. “Green” is related both to the representation of natural phenomena and to techno-scientific and social fabrication. Though, the color green can never truly be “green”, despite the availability of plant-based materials, pigments stable enough to technically fix green are often composed of toxic elements. I see this paradox as deeply embedded in our contemporary condition.
The base of the fountain was constructed from energy drink cans called Golden Power, which I collected from the streets of The Hague on my way to the studio. At the time, it was a popular drink among teenagers, and I found many of these discarded empty cans during my walks. Their visual appearance evokes a kind of battery aesthetic, which intrigued me: branding itself as “golden power”. I displayed the opened cans as if waiting to be recharged by the fountain’s “green power,” highlighting the artificial promise embedded in consumer energy culture. The liquid, however, never reaches them.
The work was accompanied by speculative display elements made from self-cooked bioplastic, cyanobacteria, and resin. During the research process, I encountered scientific studies suggesting that cyanobacteria can generate energy and potentially function as solar “batteries.” By weaving together notions of energy transition – cyanobacteria, algal blooms, renewable energy, energy drinks, fertilizers, and toxic green matter – the installation unfolded as a speculative “green” power station.
AB: Digital media often encourages flattening of complexity into images, profiles and consumable content. Your research‑based, materially layered practice seems resistant to that. How do you negotiate visibility and invisibility in a culture saturated by image‑feeds and algorithmic visibility?
KO: Sea salt crusts, cyanobacteria, limestone, and layered surfaces carry histories, ecological processes, and bodily scales that cannot be fully captured in a single frame. While digital media often reduces experience to a single scrollable image, I create physical works that demand presence - attention, movement, and sometimes touch.
By developing works that reveal themselves slowly, through proximity, I invite viewers to experience beyond the instant consumption of images, resisting the logic of immediacy. At the same time, I am conscious of visibility and invisibility in digital culture. My works can exist in photographs or online, but they only fully unfold through direct, physical presence in the space.
AB: In Cyanoceans (2024) your installation uses ultra‑organic and synthetic materials (sea salt, cyanobacteria, fluorescent pigment, water vapor) to create a sense of underwater immersion. How do you hope audiences will “navigate” your installations differently from navigating digital interfaces or social media feeds?
KO: The duo exhibition Cyanoceans (2024), created in collaboration with Tuomas A. Laitinen at Kai Art Center, was conceived as an environment that requires bodily adjustment upon entering. We wanted visitors to become physically aware of themselves in space. The lighting was dim, and the works were suspended throughout the room, requiring visitors to move carefully and remain attentive to their steps. Their presence mattered: a piece could begin to shift in response to the air currents created by their bodies, and suspended tube lights could be drawn closer to the works, allowing them to notice finer details.
Tuomas composed a site-specific sound work using ultrasound frequencies, meaning that the sound shifted depending on your position in the space. It could bounce back from a nearby wall or feel distant and diffused. Also, one of my works, Dynamics of Salt & Visibility, continued to grow on site over the six-month exhibition period, allowing the piece to gradually transform throughout the show.
This mode of navigation differs fundamentally from moving through a digital interface or scrolling a social media feed, where the body remains relatively static and actions tend to produce predictable outcomes. In Cyanoceans, navigation was spatial and sensory, opening up another way of perceiving – rooted in physical awareness and mutual influence.
AB: The discoveries around “Dark Oxygen” and non-photosynthetic ecosystems reveal hidden infrastructures of life. How does your practice, which translates these findings into immersive, visual and material forms, engage with the post-digital idea that much of the systems we rely on are invisible yet digitally and socially networked?
KO: “Dark Oxygen” forms the conceptual core of my recent work Breathing Deep Currency (2025), currently on view at the Baltic Contemporary Art Centre in England. The installation continues my earlier project Nautilus New Era (2018), but integrates this new scientific understanding of oxygen production in the deep sea.
Recent research by the Scottish Association for Marine Science, published in 2024, challenges the long-held belief that oxygen can only be produced through photosynthesis in the presence of light. The study suggests that polymetallic (manganese) nodules at the abyssal seabed may generate so-called “dark oxygen” through electrochemical processes. With the electrolysis reaction, they’re splitting seawater into oxygen and hydrogen. These same nodules are of intense interest to mining industries because they contain rare metals essential for batteries, renewable technologies, and digital infrastructures.
More in-depth research on this significant discovery is currently underway, and it is considered a potentially crucial breakthrough in efforts to protect the deep seabed, as this oxygen production may play a vital role in sustaining oceanic ecosystems. I plan to continue developing this project over the coming years.
What intrigues me are the tensions between life-supporting processes and extractive desire. The deep seabed, long dismissed as biologically inert, is now understood to be rich in life and investigated for its oxygen-generating capacities, while simultaneously positioned as a potential mining frontier. This duality mirrors the post-digital condition: digital culture presents itself as immaterial, frictionless, and clean, yet it is fundamentally grounded inmineral extraction, deep time, and ecological disturbance. The “cloud” is not weightless – it is geological.
In Breathing Deep Currency, sea-salt-grown “rare metal” sculptures float and circulate through space like a speculative currency. They reference not only deep-sea minerals but also the abstraction of power currency. By materializing these otherwise invisible infrastructures, the installation slows down the narrative of technological progress and critically exposes its dependency on submerged ecologies. The work invites viewers to breathe and think with the deep sea.
BIOGRAPHY
Alexander Burenkov is an independent curator, cultural producer and writer based in Paris. His work extends beyond traditional curatorial roles and includes organizing exhibitions in unconventional spaces, often emphasizing multidisciplinarity, interest in environmental thinking and post-digital sensibilities, encompassing projects such as Yūgen App (launched at Porto design biennale in 2021), a show in a functioning gym or online exhibition on cloud services and alternative modes of education, ecocriticism and speculative ecofeminist aesthetics. His recent projects include Don't Take It Too Seriously at Temnikova&Kasela gallery (Tallinn, 2025), Ceremony, the main project of the 10th edition of Asia Now art fair (together with Nicolas Bourriaud, Monnaie de Paris, 2024), In the Dust of This Planet (2022) at ART4 Museum; Raw and Cooked (2021), together with Pierre-Christian Brochet at Russian Ethnographic museum, St Petersburg; Re-enchanted (2021) at Voskhod gallery, Basel, and many others.
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19 Mar 2026
Infrastructures of Absurdity: Robertas Narkus on Performed Identity and Economies of Coincidence
By Alexander Burenkov
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