Nikolai Hodel

Nikolai Hodel, a Swiss epidemiologist and artist who spent nearly two years in Tanzania working at a governmental hospital, also seeks to capture those magical moments of transformation whereby-spectacular new words are conjured into being. On the beach and in the hospital’s backyards, he collected plastic beads and laboratory plastic waste which he then photographed and processed in order to liberate color and tone from pixilation. The resultant photographs achieved a startling crescendo of chromatic brilliance as if the whole palette operated on a different far higher frequency in landscapes inhabited by all manner of bird and fish-like creatures.

By bringing the art back from Switzerland to its source on African soil, Nikolai provides us with a salutary opportunity to reflect on how the industrialized nations of the West exploit Africa as a dumping ground for waste thus inflicting irreparable damage upon the continent.