In between the train carriages hurtling past in Sebastian Acker’s video work, Can’t See the Wood for the Trees, it is possible to glimpse the pine trees that make up the Russian Taiga, the vast boreal forest that stretches from the Pacific Ocean to the Ural Mountains. Recorded on route to Siberia from a window of a train travelling along the Trans-Siberian Railway, the work brings a visual reality to the unseen and often concealed transfer of materials and goods through global supply chains.

The video has been edited by Acker so that the landscape – the forest surrounding the railway lines – remains a constant though barely seen presence, revealed to us through the millisecond breaks between the carriages. Trade is thus abstractly tied to the extraction of material resources from the natural world, establishing direct links between the exploitation of the planet and that of humans and their work. 

Text by Duncan Ballantyne-Way

A short version of Can’t See the Wood for the Trees (formerly titled Trans) was awarded the 20 Seconds for Art Award at Vienna Viennale (2022) after being shown on over 3400 screens on Austrian buses, trams and underground stations, as part of a public art project by KÖR - Kunst im Öffentlichen Raum Wien (2022). The long version was shown at Kunstverein Dresden as part of Acker’s solo exhibition, Please Keep the Door Closed (2022), at SAP Space Berlin as part of the a 2-person exhibition Before - During - After, and in Berlin’s oldest cinema, Kino Moviemento, as part of B-LA-M — a three-year art exchange connecting Berlin, Los Angeles, and Mexico City.

« The video manages to pose numerous questions about consumption, transport logistics and globalisation through minimalist formal language. The nature that flashes up again and again between the transport containers makes people ask questions about their own motivations and longings. »

Jury Statement
20 Seconds for Art Award