"Soft Ground, Hard Work" is part of Lea Anić’s long-term project, "Construction Time," which investigates attitudes toward our built environment, construction, and land. The exhibition explores how and why we continue to occupy natural resources that are already under extreme pressure, revealing the neoliberal structures behind decisions regarding public spaces, resources, and the climate crisis.
Working with an installation consisting of metal and wooden elements that house analog photography, text, video, sound, and found objects, Anić seeks new ways to interpret evidence found at various construction sites. What information lingers on the site beyond what we can grasp through sight and language?
Recognizing the changes on the sites, “Soft Ground, Hard Work” opts for speculative fiction rather than a documentary approach to illuminate the complex power relations behind the scenes. By subverting the form of a museum exhibit and displacing images captured on color reversal film into a speculative future past, the installation distorts our perspective and demands that we decide whether what we are seeing is progress or decay.
“Construction sites and darkrooms are kept out of sight – behind sidings, and red lights. The film hiding in the roll hiding in the camera sees the light for an instant and captures that single view: that frame at that moment. The film continues to roll, grasping sights as one grasps for air between arm strokes when learning to swim. Only less rhythmically. If we walk in a cave holding our breath and fire the shutter each time we can't avoid exhaling and inhaling again, what would the photos depict?
The darkness expands across the whole room, no windows, no interruptions, for the film to be developed, for each frame to be revealed and enlarged. From the experience that creates them to the images they hold, photos exist in their full potential inside the darkroom. During the darkroom. It is as much a time as a space, in which the past experience is left behind and the future visibility it can give place to is still uncertain, being defined, designed, deviated. Likewise, a building is all it can be during a construction site. That time and space in which a past idea of living has been demolished and future visions of societal life that it can give place to are still a promise. Most of the time, however, what is to be built has been defined and designed beforehand and elsewhere.”
– from the exhibition introduction by Carla Zaccagnini
– from the exhibition introduction by Carla Zaccagnini
Kilde:
Danske Grafikeres Hus
Danske Grafikeres Hus
Fakta
Lea Anić (b. 1990) lives and works in Copenhagen and Zagreb. She obtained her MFA in 2019 from the School of Conceptual and Contextual Practices at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. There, she co-founded and led the Laboratory for Context-Specific Art Practices (Site Lab) as part of a research project together with Carla Zaccagnini from 2021 to 2023, and continued teaching externally afterwards. In 2024, she taught the course Analog Photography at the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts. Anić has exhibited her work at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen; MKC in Split; Gallery SC and HDLU in Zagreb; and other galleries.