both/and
Amalia Lindo
01.05.2026 - 30.05.2026
1/10-12 Moreland Road
Brunswick East, 3057
Amalia Lindo
01.05.2026 - 30.05.2026
1/10-12 Moreland Road
Brunswick East, 3057
Haydens is pleased to present both/and, Amalia Lindo's first solo exhibition with the gallery.
At its centre is the question of complicity: how to remain critical of systems one is dependent upon, and what it means to make art within that condition. Lindo's earlier practice examined the invisible human labour that sustains digital systems: the dispersed, anonymous workers whose efforts underpin the apparent autonomy of artificial intelligence. both/and extends that inquiry to the environmental conditions underlying those same technologies, drawing on primary research conducted across ten months living and working in the Atacama Desert, Chile.
Chile holds the world's largest lithium reserves, concentrated beneath the salt flats and brine fields of the Atacama, the driest desert on the planet. Lithium is the material that makes rechargeable batteries possible, powering everything from smartphones and laptops to electric vehicles, which are increasingly promoted as a solution to fossil fuel dependency. For the Lickanantay communities who have inhabited this landscape for generations, water, wind, minerals, plants, and humans form a single system of interdependence. This understanding of the land stands in direct tension with its accelerating transformation into an industrial resource.
The Atacama is one site within a global network of extraction. The exhibition also encompasses the lithium and copper deposits of Western and South Australia and the cobalt mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the social and environmental costs of technological production are concentrated in communities far removed from the consumers they supply.
Across sculpture, drawing, video and photography, the grid functions as a shared language within the exhibition: of resource management, geological survey, and the organisation of data into navigable computational space. At the centre of the room, a large gridded perspex installation extends this logic into physical space, functioning as an expanded drawing. In the Terraform wall sculptures, mine site topographies derived from geological survey data are CNC-milled from extruded polystyrene or resin-printed, rendered as tiled, modular forms and encased in translucent 3D-printed frames that recall the exposed casings of early consumer electronics. The Tierra Plana drawings carry their own geometric order. Mineral pigments collected and prepared by hand in the desert, several with a long history in manuscripts and maps, are rubbed into the surface and overlaid with pen-plotted lines derived from geological models. The larger Tierra Plana drawings overlay these mineral markings onto hand-drawn blueprints of Northern Rhodesian copper mines from the 1950s, placing mid-century cartographic draughtsmanship in contact with the three-dimensional outputs of contemporary geological modelling software. What shifts between them is technique; what persists is the reduction of landscape to resource.
In her single-channel film La Oscuridad (2025), the grid structure enters the editing itself through the film's split screens and minimap navigation, borrowed from the visual language of game design to abstract drone footage of Atacama lithium operations into navigable, extractable space. Carlos Vega's narration holds a Lickanantay understanding of that same landscape in which such divisions do not exist. Two photographic works, El Tatio (-22.3349, -68.0130) and Supernova 1987A (1.6 quintillion kilometres) draw this arc further. The first documents geothermal activity in the Atacama; the second is a telescopic photograph of a supernova remnant, tracing the origins of the same minerals found below ground to stellar events billions of years prior.
both/and does not offer resolution. From stellar formation to extraction site, it holds in view the full arc of these materials, asking the viewer to consider their own place within the systems that continue to erode these landscapes.
Amalia would like to extend her sincere thanks to Carlos Vega and Sandra Flores González for their generosity in sharing the stories that helped shape this project. She would also like to thank the La Wayaka Current team—Sey, Paloma, Gabriel, Maca, Victor, and Sofie. A very special thank you to Eduardo Seymour for his assistance with the drone footage and for being her translator, guide, housemate, and trusted friend in San Pedro de Atacama. She would also like to thank Dr. Dean Schrieke for his ongoing contributions to her work and Rohan Schwartz for the many conversations that shaped her thinking.
La Oscuridad was made possible by the generous support of the Ellen José Memorial Foundation and Bayside Gallery.
both/and: Audio-visual performanceAt its centre is the question of complicity: how to remain critical of systems one is dependent upon, and what it means to make art within that condition. Lindo's earlier practice examined the invisible human labour that sustains digital systems: the dispersed, anonymous workers whose efforts underpin the apparent autonomy of artificial intelligence. both/and extends that inquiry to the environmental conditions underlying those same technologies, drawing on primary research conducted across ten months living and working in the Atacama Desert, Chile.
Chile holds the world's largest lithium reserves, concentrated beneath the salt flats and brine fields of the Atacama, the driest desert on the planet. Lithium is the material that makes rechargeable batteries possible, powering everything from smartphones and laptops to electric vehicles, which are increasingly promoted as a solution to fossil fuel dependency. For the Lickanantay communities who have inhabited this landscape for generations, water, wind, minerals, plants, and humans form a single system of interdependence. This understanding of the land stands in direct tension with its accelerating transformation into an industrial resource.
The Atacama is one site within a global network of extraction. The exhibition also encompasses the lithium and copper deposits of Western and South Australia and the cobalt mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the social and environmental costs of technological production are concentrated in communities far removed from the consumers they supply.
Across sculpture, drawing, video and photography, the grid functions as a shared language within the exhibition: of resource management, geological survey, and the organisation of data into navigable computational space. At the centre of the room, a large gridded perspex installation extends this logic into physical space, functioning as an expanded drawing. In the Terraform wall sculptures, mine site topographies derived from geological survey data are CNC-milled from extruded polystyrene or resin-printed, rendered as tiled, modular forms and encased in translucent 3D-printed frames that recall the exposed casings of early consumer electronics. The Tierra Plana drawings carry their own geometric order. Mineral pigments collected and prepared by hand in the desert, several with a long history in manuscripts and maps, are rubbed into the surface and overlaid with pen-plotted lines derived from geological models. The larger Tierra Plana drawings overlay these mineral markings onto hand-drawn blueprints of Northern Rhodesian copper mines from the 1950s, placing mid-century cartographic draughtsmanship in contact with the three-dimensional outputs of contemporary geological modelling software. What shifts between them is technique; what persists is the reduction of landscape to resource.
In her single-channel film La Oscuridad (2025), the grid structure enters the editing itself through the film's split screens and minimap navigation, borrowed from the visual language of game design to abstract drone footage of Atacama lithium operations into navigable, extractable space. Carlos Vega's narration holds a Lickanantay understanding of that same landscape in which such divisions do not exist. Two photographic works, El Tatio (-22.3349, -68.0130) and Supernova 1987A (1.6 quintillion kilometres) draw this arc further. The first documents geothermal activity in the Atacama; the second is a telescopic photograph of a supernova remnant, tracing the origins of the same minerals found below ground to stellar events billions of years prior.
both/and does not offer resolution. From stellar formation to extraction site, it holds in view the full arc of these materials, asking the viewer to consider their own place within the systems that continue to erode these landscapes.
Amalia would like to extend her sincere thanks to Carlos Vega and Sandra Flores González for their generosity in sharing the stories that helped shape this project. She would also like to thank the La Wayaka Current team—Sey, Paloma, Gabriel, Maca, Victor, and Sofie. A very special thank you to Eduardo Seymour for his assistance with the drone footage and for being her translator, guide, housemate, and trusted friend in San Pedro de Atacama. She would also like to thank Dr. Dean Schrieke for his ongoing contributions to her work and Rohan Schwartz for the many conversations that shaped her thinking.
La Oscuridad was made possible by the generous support of the Ellen José Memorial Foundation and Bayside Gallery.
Amalia Lindo
Dean Schrieke
Saturday 30th of May
6 - 9 pm
Purchase Tickets Here
Amalia Lindo and Dean Schrieke present a live audio-visual performance to mark the closing of both/and, extending the themes of the exhibition. Lindo works live with the materials of the exhibition—footage and images drawn from her research, assembled and projected onto the gallery wall. Schrieke performs alongside on an analogue instrument designed to resist the logic of automation: one that responds to the body's conductivity, to pressure and moisture, and whose own origins are not without contradiction. Audio sourced directly from Lindo's video works shapes the sound as it unfolds, drawing the two practices into a single live work. The performance will be followed by a closing celebration, with a set by DJ Waste MGMT.
Lindo is a multidisciplinary artist whose work examines the hidden supply chains of data, labour, and natural resources that sustain contemporary technology. Schrieke is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Melbourne and a practising sound and conceptual artist. Together they have presented collaborative works at the NGV, RMIT Gallery, and the Centre for Contemporary Photography, among others.
Doors open at 6pm, performance starts at 6:30pm sharp.
