HERO

The work positions the oil tanker as the exhibition’s lead character—a vast 25 meter mural that spans the gallery wall and commands the room. The oil tanker is placed in the spotlight, not as background infrastructure but as the narrative’s driving force: a vessel that has powered an entire century of mobility, trade, and wealth while propelling us toward the climate emergency. Its hull, edged in an ominous crimson echo of marine toxins, reminds us how prosperity and pollution have travelled side by side, seeping into oceans, skies, and even our bodies.

In redefining the tanker as protagonist, we are invited to stand before a machine that is both monumental and mortal. Rendered at roughly one-tenth of the scale—small by shipyard standards yet still large enough to dwarf the viewer—the tanker oscillates between the sublime and the sinister. The work sits at the centre of energy politics and global inequality, yet it also signals a fading era as renewables begin to take hold. The work frames this contradiction through multiple lenses—history, ecology, scale, poetry, and decay—asking viewers to confront where we are in the story of fossil fuel: inheritors of immense convenience, witnesses to accelerating harm, and uncertain authors of what comes next—and how long this “Hero” should remain on stage.

Commissioned by Berlinische Galerie 2025