SUSPENDED MATTER
EXHIBITION
SEPTEMBER 2023 - AMSTERDAM
CURATED BY RODERICK VAN DER LEE
Suspended Matter is an ecological term for small particles adrift in either air or water. The theme is symbolic for a sense of powerlessness we can experience as individuals, when confronted with vast powers, good or bad, that move us through our natural or constructed environments.
This exhibition shows a spectrum of artistic reflections on this theme, in forms that explore where photography ends, and video art, installations, sculpture and digital art begin. A journey that takes us past longing for the landscape of youth, the representation of nature, our conflicted relationship to constructed environments, our equally complex relationship to harnessing the power of nature, and the consequences of doing so.
Jaehun Park
OVERHEATED WINDMILL
2020
3D RENDERED SIMULATION WITH SEAMLESS LOOP
Overheated Windmill deals with seeing windmill as world heritage nowadays and its industrial usage for colony build on 17th. Windmills were designed to harness the powers of nature by using the force of the wind to pump water out of low-lying areas, saw wood or grind grain. It was used especially in the Netherlands to manage water and keep dry land by preventing floods. In present times these functions are gone and exist as a wonderful Dutch landscape for tourists as a world heritage site.
The mills that were used for sawing wood ensured a flourishing shipbuilding industry in the Zaanstreek region in Old Holland. This is where the world’s first bona fide industrial zone emerged in the 17th century. Around 1650, some 75 ships were built here each year. Even Tsar Peter the Great came over from Russia to learn how to build a ship in Zaandam. These ships - built by windmill technology - enabled to build a bigger sized ship and it became the cornerstone for the construction of a lucrative trade routes that made the 17th Century a ‘Golden Age’.
Next to prosperity, the period is also responsible for a darker side, of colonization and repression. The Dutch East Indies Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie) is considered to be the world first multinational and publicly traded company, and served as a blue print for multinationals now, whose manufacturing and international trade is considered to be one of the most important strains on the natural world, and a leading cause of the climate crisis. As such, the powers unleashed by the windmill in the past cast a dark cloud in the present
Morovid K
THIS TOO SHALL PASS
2022
MIXED MATERIAL INSTALLATION
Overwhelmed by the images of the wildfires in Australia (2019/2020), Morvarid K felt the urge to go there. She wanted to see the static, silent, empty and lifeless landscapes, to confront what remains despite the devastation.
Cai Guo Qiang's "Falling Back to Earth" then came back to her mind: this wolf that has just fallen to the ground, stunned by the impact, yet gradually gets up, forgets his trauma and blindly reintegrates the same endless repetitive cycle.
Morvarid’s project questions the complexity of human perception, the adjustment mechanism that allows us to tame the brutal, the destructive. How we set up a process to make the Thanatos bearable. Without forgetting our strength to seek beauty in absolute darkness.
This project began in Australia in 2020 and continued in France in 2021 and 2022, with the trace of the major fires affecting both countries.
The project is divided into three parts; the persistence of the past, which relates the initial difficulty in accepting the destruction caused by the fire; the trace of the present, the moment of awareness and the desire to be as close as possible to the problem for a better grasp; and finally the weaving of the future, the moment when the subject slips into the background and our attention turns to other things, without having solved the problem of wild bushfires, let alone the cause behind them: the climate crisis.
Djeneba Aduayom
ATMOSPHERIC PERSPECTIVE
2022
VIDEO
Moved by the notion that our collective actions and inactions continue to destroy our world and resources, and that the nature of this reality is brutal, the artist created Atmospheric Perspective, a poetic vision of what we are transforming our planet into.
To depict the feeling of the Earth melting and rising levels of toxicity in the air, the artist used a combination of various technologies to animate a series of still images into a video piece.
She asks what will be left of us once we are gone - Mere installations that might offer a testament of our past presence? Or, perhaps, nothing at all, only a scorched planet haunted by distant memories and false illusions? The artist’s hope is the viewer experiences their own perceptual sensations when looking at this work and is compelled to do their part to protect this planet we call home.
AKMAR
VANITAS
2020
SCULPTURAL VIDEOLIGHT INSTALLATION
The artist collected ready-to-use 3D models of flowers, delved into the archives to get them working again on software that was sometimes decades old and now presents them as one digital ornamental field of flowers; virtual flowers that could never have existed simultaneously.
The result is alienating and enchanting. The colourful flowers flow gracefully across the LCD screens - their physical 'vase'. The black power and video cables connecting the screens meander between them, like the jagged branches of wild bushes.
Rough and pixelated, created with just a few lines or smooth and realistic in high resolution: the design of the digital flowers reveals something about the development of technology in recent decades. The most modern flowers are not necessarily the most beautiful.
Akmar’s play with time is given an added dimension in the screens; she uses old, slightly yellowed models from a German office building. Their position in relation to the window determined the way they are now discoloured. The longer the screens were in the sun before, the more yellow they now look. The passage of time is stored in both the digital and physical material.
The source material on which the flowers were programmed are often photographic, and through the installation the images turn into the literal translation of photography again: drawing with light. The light from the screens dances on the white wall, just like a negative is transferred to a white sheet of paper during the photographic process.
Displaced Materials
CITYSCAPES
2023
PHOTOGRAPHIC SCULPTURE
Cityscapes is a photographic sculpture/installation project that delves into the complex and often-ignored relationship between the city and the human body. The project seeks to explore how these two entities shape each other mutually, and how their interplay gives rise to unique forms of organic and artificial matter.
The project is built around a mixture of construction materials and photographs printed on fabric and perspex, creating an immersive space that challenges the viewer's perception of the subject and context. The interplay between the photographs and materials is deliberate, creating a subtle dialogue between the organic and inorganic. The textures and forms of the materials used are juxtaposed against the photographs, creating an effect that is both disorienting and captivating.
By reimagining these object/images in a sculptural form, the project seeks to reveal the underlying connections between the human body and the city, and to prompt the viewer to consider their own place within this dynamic relationship.
Ultimately, Cityscape is a project about transformation and displacement. It invites the viewer to consider the ways in which the city and the body shape each other, and to explore the complex and often-unseen connections that exist between these two entities.
Thom van Rijckevorsel
FIXING FRICTION FICTION
2022
VIDEO LOOP
A hand holding a piece of wood is cut by an invisible line, which runs diagonally through the center of the image. The line is the result of a splitscreen that creates a split second time difference between left and right. When the piece of wood is completely stationary, the image seems to be in sync for a moment.
The work plays with the relation of tangible reality and the (digital) image. There’s an interaction between the simple and obvious digital intervention and the action of the hand. The latter seems aware of it and plays with it.
Furthermore, the piece of wood shows the natural notion of time through it’s clearly visible graining, a biological marker of time passing.
As such, the work evokes a sense of dissociation from nature at our own hand, and begs the question whether time is a human construct or part of the natural world.
Stijn Elshuis
HOLY MOUNTAIN
2023
MULTI MEDIA INSTALLATION
The photograph portrays a mountain of coal at TATA-Steel, a renowned Dutch company infamous for being one of the largest polluters in the Netherlands. The pollution emanating from TATA-Steel has a profound and detrimental impact on the health of residents in the surrounding area, leading to reduced lifespans and an increased risk of cancer. It is disheartening to observe that these companies often appear immune to accountability, and the coal mountains have seemingly acquired a holy-like status. Superimposed upon this image are flashing line drawings depicting the Nazca lines.
The Nazca Lines are a series of geoglyphs located in the Nazca Desert in southern Peru. Crafted between 500 BCE and 500 CE, these geoglyphs were created by individuals who made incisions or shallow markings in the desert floor, removing pebbles to expose differently colored soil.
In 1985, archaeologist Johan Reinhard conducted extensive research, presenting a comprehensive body of archaeological, ethnographic, and historical evidence. His findings highlighted the paramount role of worshipping mountains and water sources in the Nazca religion and economy throughout ancient and contemporary periods.
Reinhard postulated that the lines and figures etched into the Nazca Desert were integral to religious practices centered around worshiping of Gods associated with water availability, which directly influenced agricultural prosperity and productivity. He interpreted the lines as sacred pathways leading to sites where these deities were honored. The figures themselves symbolized animals and objects, serving as a symbolic invocation for divine assistance in procuring water. Nevertheless, the precise meanings of many individual geoglyphs within the Nazca Lines remain enigmatic.
By placing these two entities opposite each other, the artist aims to stimulate a dialogue regarding how we confront companies such as Tata-Steel. In today's society, it seems that we revere the wrong "Gods," emphasizing misplaced priorities.
Philippe Groubnov
POCHVA
2023
MULTIMEDIA INSTALLATION
The soil in this complex installation was brought in from the Belarusian village “Zhirovichi”, the village of the artist’s grandparents. It was collected near the Spring of holy water.
Around the spring the lush vegetation creates a place of tranquility, a place where the biblical myths breathe through the matter of the landscape.
The “pochva” is alive, it houses billions of living beings -traces of the distant landscape. The organisms in the soil are breathing, feeding, metabolizing. Their vitality produces an electrical charge.
“Since the Russian invasion into Ukraine I have not been able to return to Belarus. The village of my grandparents, along with it’s Holy Spring are now only a memory. The memory - shared like a collective hallucination of a promised land. A land, existing on a different scale of time, eternally near and distant.”
“Pochva” is an installation in which the electrical signals produced by microorganisms are shaping the reconstructed “Memory Landscape” in real-time.
It starts with the soil brought from the artist’s grandparent’s village and the soils sensor that the artist developed together with Annemerel Mol and David Striks of Wageningen University. Microorganisms in the soil produce electrical charge, the “movements” of that charge are mesaured in real-time. The signal measured in the soil is changing several parameters in the digital landscape (created in Unity and developed by Ilya Doreanu).
The rendered landscape is modelled on images from the artist’s memory of the Belarusian landscape. The signal from the soil sensor affects the vegetation growth, sunlight and the rain. As such both the artist’s memory and the soil draw the landscape with light on the screen.
Tara Fallaux
ALMOST THERE
2023
MULTIMEDIA INSTALLATION
With her film installation ALMOST THERE Tara Fallaux investigates the interaction between 2- and 3dimensional realms, merging a cinematic analogue special effect from early 1900 theatre and visuals inspired by early cinema in newly created backgrounds. In her experiment the old optical illusion is transported to the present, using photography, film, photo backgrounds and a mirror.
A key aspect is the integration of a filmed floating female body. Placed within the centuries old theatrical contraption the floating body suggests a hologram, using the old Peppers Ghost Technique of reflection. Apart from the technical and aesthetic this is the philosophical theme that Tara explores: the ungraspable of the seemingly concrete. In this case the juxtaposition between a moving ephemeral body and the still environment in which it is projected. In the age of bewildering digital realities Tara pays tribute to the transparency of analogue special effects. What stuns here is the magic of simplicity.
For the accompanying soundscape Tara collaborated with musician Sterre Konijn. They decided to work with the theme of air and references to the early cinema era. Sterre composed a soundtrack mainly using her own voice and whispers together with the sound of the Theremin. The Theremin, invented in 1920, is an electronic musical instrument controlled without physical contact by the performer. It is played in the air. It is the only instrument in the world that can be played without needing to be touched. The magnetic field is changed by the varying distances between the two hands.
