FILLING THE CRACKS
EXHIBITION
SEPTEMBER 2021 - AMSTERDAM
CURATED BY MARCEL FEIL, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR FOAM e.t.
For this inaugural exhibition of Unbound, work is presented that focusses on the representation of of our relationship to nature. It is obvious to almost everyone that mankind must enter into a new relationship with nature. Especially from the realization that nature is not something that lies outside of us, but that we ourselves are an inseparable part of it and are connected to it. The search for a different and more responsible relationship with our planet is urgent and is of an economic, ecological, social, psychological and spiritual nature. Many artists focus on this fundamental shift that ultimately has to heal the relationship with nature. Literally: what is broken, what is cracked must be made whole again. Hence the title 'Filling the Cracks'.
Maarten Baas
SECOND NATURE - WATER
2021
66 SCREEN INSTALLATION WITH 15' LOOP
‘Water’ is the second part of the four-part ‘Second Nature’ by Maarten Baas. The first part ‘fire’ was launched in 2018. Reality is increasingly viewed virtually, via social media, holograms, or other new techniques. For ‘Second Nature - Water’ Baas made a call on social media to send as many videos as possible of waterfalls from all over the world. He assembled these films with monitors into a collage of waterfalls, which together also form a virtual waterfall. As is often the case in Baas’s work, he is simultaneously a user and a critic of the culture of which he is a part.
Lara Almarcegui
GRAVES (GRAVEL)
2021
HD FILM INSTALLATION
“Graves” offers a geological perspective of the area of Lleida and the terrain of the river Segre through the relationship between the noisy quarry environment and the extensive mountain belt of the Pyrenees, formed between 80 and 20 million years ago when the Iberian Peninsula collided with the rest of Europe. Lara Almarcegui questions herself: what happens when La Plana del Corb, the industrial complex of Sorigué near the town of Balaguer, stops working for a day? The result is laid down in her new video projection: Graves.
Dafna Talmor
UNTITLED (CO-161616161616161616-1)
CONSTRUCTED LANDSCAPES (Volume III)
2021
PHOTOGRAPHIC SCULPTURAL INSTALLATION
This large-scale sculptural installation is an extension of Constructed Landscapes, an ongoing project, which at its core, consists of photographs made from collaged negatives. Playing with the idea of a plurality of viewpoints via multi-directional landscapes, the work defies traditional notions of a singular, fixed and idealized view. Purporting more dynamic/active ways of seeing, the work aims to reject a binary opposition of nature versus culture, and instead, alludes to the notion that human beings are implicated and complicit in the creation of a culturally constructed and politically loaded landscape.
Letha Wilson
WEEPING ROCK STEEL
VALLEY OF FIRE NESTED ROCKS STEEL
JOSHUA TREE GRANITE PIERCED TREES
2019
SCULPTURES (UV PRINT ON CORTEN STEEL)
Wilson expands the boundaries between photography and sculpture by questioning how a photograph can be physically engaged. She trades the traditional confines of a photographic image by merging them with industrial materials like concrete or steel. In doing so, she questions the duality between the natural landscape and our synthetic society. These works contain photographs from sites in the American west that Wilson has traveled to, which she has manipulated in her studio and then printed on Corten steel. Some sculptures fluently mirror the lines of the pictured landscape, while others contain sharp geometric forms which produce an interplay of shadow and light on the images.
David De Beyter
THE DISTANCE IS…
2023
6 4K SCREEN INSTALLATION
STUDY OF A MAGICAL PLACE I is a film shot in 16mm on the heights of Teide on the Spanish island of Tenerife. This film is a landscape study. The “Las Canadas” site, which is defined in amateur scientific ufology jargon as a “Magical Place”, is the central subject. The display is conceived as an immersive visual experience on the obsolescence of a belief, on the end of a modern myth.
Anna Rùn Tryggvadottir
HRINGVELLI / THINGVELLIR TURNING
2018
VIDEO
The landscape intervention brings a mechanical device
seamlessly into the earth at Thingvellir National Park on Iceland, where a clip section of land is relocated on top of a motor that without any visible trace rotates the clip section counter clockwise, one round every 4 1/2 minute. The rotation highlights the volatile and transformative landscape of the site, that sits in between the riff of the Eurasian and American tectonic plates. The entire site has fallen 50-100 meters into the ground and is thus protected from the highland winds and holds an entirely different weather climate than the prairies around. This caused the site to become the chosen point of meeting for people
gathering from across the country. In the year 930 it was set as the first parliament in the world.
Thomas Albdorf
FIVE DAYS
2021
MIXED MEDIA INSTALLATION
“Five Days” shows simple sculptural arrangements created and photographed in a studio combined with images of streets in New York City taken over the course of five days; none of the sculptures were actually ever on location. The images where created with social media in mind - to walk the thin line between trolling the potential viewer and engaging them in a respectful, yet playful way to question the nature of images perceived online.
Joost Vandebrug
EVERYTHING FLOWS
2021
5 4K SCREEN VIDEO SCULPTURE
Inspired by Heraclitus "You can never step into the same river twice". As a lasting evidence of the temporary state the Danube river was once in, each screen represents a different moment in time. The installation consists of a single video loop of a drone scanning the Danube in bird’s-eye. Playback starts at the top screen and is repeated in the screens below, each time with a 21 second delay, until all screens are on and a joined up section of the river is formed.
Sheida Soleimani
Medium of Exchange
2020- 2021
VIDEO, PHOTOGRAPHIC TENT AND SCULPTURES
Medium of Exchange investigates the relationship between leaders of OPEC countries and Western governments that have been involved in conflict as a result of oil interest. Soleimani constructs staged scenes, to highlight the correlation between the mismanagement of oil-rich economies and civil rights issues. In these photographs and the accompanying film she choreographs theatrical portraits of actors assuming the caricatured identities of OPEC Oil Ministers and government officials, proposing a romantic interplay between the leaders thereby creating a parody of real life set against the backdrop of oil fields that dominate the landscape of each region.
MOON HOTEL
2021
VIDEO INSTALLATION
(SOUND DESIGN: OLIVER HEGYI)
Moon Motel reveals a total lunar eclipse that Rédling filmed years earlier as a memory, and which slowly became her personal memento. A real physical space of a motel’s dining room was transformed into a fragmented, melting scene by photogrammetry. Its arch is creating a threshold, a transitional phase between reality and nostalgia in which everything is still in motion in search of a resting point, reflecting on the confusion and tension around and within us.
Alix Marie
CURTAIN CALL
2021
PHOTOGRAPHY ON POLYESTER SILK
Alix Marie’s work explores our relationship to bodies and their representation with an interest in addressing gender stereotypes through visceral, genuine and an often-humorous approach.
Curtain Call expands on Marie’s ongoing investigations on the topology of the female body, as well as on photography’s potential for materiality and its historical relationship with fabric and fetishism. With this piece, Marie more specifically interprets the performance of femininity on stage and the symbolic of the showgirl.
Kevin Bray
MORPHER
2021
SITE-SPECIFIC MIXED MEDIA INSTALLATION
Playing with the porosity of diverse Media; re-organizing mediums and tools to shape a language that would be welcoming to all of them, the work of Kevin Bray engages with different types of communication strategies. Traversing from cinema, graphic design, illustration, painting, sculpture to music and writing, in his work Bray blends and conceptualizes all of the parameters of these expressions to build up symbolic narratives, commenting on our diverse existences and the appearances they embody.
Inka and Niklas
4K ULTRA HD / LIQUIFY SERIES
2020
INSTALLATION
4K Ultra HD deals with our consumption of landscapes through (camera-) lenses and screens. Our image of the landscape is formed by photography and nature is constructed by the stream of images on our screens. The photographic works and installations of the exhibition focus on the “4K ULTRA HD” image search, terms used in the display industry to illustrate that their screens have a True-to-life picture quality. These photographic images with commercial purpose are printed on a specific flexible material and draped , recontextualising nature completely into an unnatural form.
Popel Coumou
140_UNTITLED
2021
As humans, we long for a makeable world. We try to shape nature the way we shape our built environment. Popel shows how we as humans try to build using the building blocks of nature. This work depicts an
interior built up from photographs of skies. The contrast between the material used, the space depicted and the natural skies is heavy.
This exhibiton was made possible with the support of Fonds21, Unseen Photo Fair, Westergas, AV- Registered, Institut pour la Photographie Lille, Cédric Bacqueville, Harlan Levey Projects, Edel Assanti, Erika Déak, Dorothée Nilsson Gallery, TOBE, Galerie Ron Mandos, Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Webber Gallery, Ingrid Deuss, NContemporary & Stigter van Doesburg
