Nicholas Mangan – The Current, 2026 Nicholas Mangan – Termite Economies: Phase 3 (Rorschach), (Root Causes/Termite Topology), (Neural Nest), (Trophallaxis), 2019-2020

Two works by Nicholas Mangan examine how value is produced and circulated. One, a film, centres on tevau, a form of red-feather money from the Santa Cruz Islands, part of the Solomon Islands in the Pacific. Tevau makers bound thousands of scarlet honeyeater feathers into coils valued for the labour they embodied and for their colour and scarcity. Mangan begins from a disparity: the feathers carry exchange value, while the bird itself is assigned almost no value at all. He worked with a tevau and a scarlet honeyeater specimen held by the Musée des Confluences in Lyon. His film sequences thousands of photographs of the dead bird, its red feathers flashing rapidly enough to leave an afterimage. The installation, by contrast, considers how termite colonies maintain their mounds through distributed labour, moving soil and breaking down dead material. This activity produces neither currency nor stored wealth; it sustains the colony. Mineral prospectors, however, read termite mounds as signs of deposits underground, turning the termites’ life-sustaining work into an instrument of extraction.

Through processes of deconstruction and recomposition, Nicholas Mangan works with objects marked by historical traces to develop what he describes as “material storytelling”. His practice examines the conditions that shape relationships between nature, technology and value, attending to the circulation and systems of exchange.