Artist: Gabriela Mureb

Gabriela Mureb (b. Brazil; living & working in Rio de Janeiro), known for her sculptural machines and performative installations, presents Crash — a new video work presented for the first in the UK. It was developed during a residency* and a research visit to BMW’s Dismantling and Recycling Centre in Germany. Rooted in her ongoing exploration of the body as machine and the interplay of mechanical and sonic repetition, Crash captures a visceral collapse: a choreography of destruction in which mechanical utterances emerge as raw, rhythmic language — the body coming undone, unsettling in its beauty and violence.

Through a dense, textured soundscape of whirring motors, cracking metal and hums, the work documents the systematic dismantling of a car by a lone operator, who controls a massive robotic arm with uncanny precision from inside a sealed cockpit—an internal chamber. The camera moves fluidly between wide shots of the industrial warehouse and intimate close-ups—from joystick-driven gestures to the machine’s point of view. As multi-coloured wires are yanked from within the vehicle’s interior and wound up like spaghetti whilst the exterior shell crumples like foil from a sweet wrapper, the vehicle is gradually transformed into a toblerone-shaped prism of compressed metal. At times, the visual language evokes the strange theatre of a candy claw machine — the surgical arms reaching with calculated precision into a closed system, extracting fragments of something once whole. Yet, rather than delivering sweetness, these gestures yield brokenness, evoking transience, obsolescence, and the illusion of control. The destruction becomes strangely sensuous, even erotic—a collapse rendered with poetic pacing and an unsettledness.

The title, Crash, gestures not only to the impact of metal on metal, but to the dissolution of boundaries between body and machine. As the car is disassembled and reformed, the work becomes a meditation on decomposition—of objects, bodies, systems, and the ecosystems we mirror through industrial design.

The film is accompanied by a sculpture column (from the Column/Tower series) made from gears, pulleys, and bearings – basic elements for transmitting movement, force, and speed in a machine – collected in scrapyards in Rio de Janeiro. These are used parts: each one has a unique history, having been used in industrial technical apparatus – many of them being historical pieces. If the vertical, phallic shape and the technical symbols evoke an image of strength and brutality, the sculptural gesture that produces these works, the simple process of stacking, reveals a fragile, unstable structure.

*Crash was produced by Mureb during Air-m Ebenböckhaus / Salta Art’s Program residency in Munich, the film follows the dismantling process of a test car at BMW’s Dismantling and Recycling Centre in Unterschleißheim, in the metropolitan region of Munich.