Situated at the intersection of science, new materialist philosophy, film, and contemporary art, New Mineral Collective are an artist duo formed in 2012 by Tanya Busse and Emilija Škarnulytė. Their work questions geography, landscape, ecology, and human relations with nature. It comes as no surprise that their exhibition, “Erotics of Counter-Prospecting,” ventures into diverse landscapes of varying geopolitical significance: Svalbard, Kirkenes, Las Vegas, the Dead Sea. At times, landscapes of snow, ice, earth, and mountains resemble skin, able to give and receive touch and warmth. The works open a space for a sensual connection with nature. As I move through the gallery, Susan Sontag’s famous words in Against Interpretation (1964) keep coming back to me: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” The exhibition opens with Hollow Earth, a widely shown and reviewed film from 2013. It shows poetic images of snowscapes and mines at Svalbard, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean off the northern coast of Norway, where coal mining was once the core activity but is almost abolished today. New to this exhibition is the transfer of Hollow Earth from HD video to 16mm film. The sound of the projector and the grainy images …