Sculptural Landscapes

Sculptural Landscapes curated by Trine Stephensen for Copenhagen Photo Festival presents a number of Scandinavian artists who all work with the sculptural and abstract qualities of photography. In their works, they approach the landscape as phenomenon, and we meet both man-made and natural landscapes as well as internal and external landscapes. Here, the landscape is both a universal fact and a personal affair, and the artists’ approach is just as many-faceted. We meet works created directly in the camera, but also works that are distorted, faded, twisted and sampled outside of the camera. And the artists do not limit themselves to working within the frame, they challenge the surface of the image itself as they move outside of the frame in spatial installations.

Text by Marius Moldvær to accompany the exhibition:

The Building of an island

“No man is an island”
John Donne

To even begin to fathom the idea of constructing an island we need to separate each part of an island into fragments, break it down so that only individual pieces remain, separated as their own autonomous entities: Mountain, earth, greenery, water, and rocks—the list is potentially endless as to what you perceive as being an autonomous entity. And when we see an island, or a landscape, so finely broken apart, it’s hard to recognize that it even has the potential to be gathered into a complete vista. To further problematize our current undertaking we will introduce humans, animals, culture, migration, development, that development’s crisis, and collapse. We introduce people admiring the vista, and people living off and with the land. And as we start to assemble the island from all the separate autonomous parts, they begin to connect to each other and form relations, relations that simultaneously hides part of their individuality and grants them a new function within their interconnectedness. When the island is complete, and history has begun, a question naturally poses itself: is the landscape made clear in each individual part as an autonomous thing, or as a collective whole?

The reason I begin this text with what seems as an abstract thought experiment is that the title of the exhibition, Sculptural Landscape, curated by Trine Stephensen, invokes in us, quite naturally, the idea of shaping and building, where the exhibiting artists Adam Jeppesen, Linn Pedersen, Johan Österholm, Marianne Bjørnmyr, Miriam Nielsen, and Inka and Niklas don’t merley create or shape, but also challenges our idea of what constitutes a landscape and how it is perceived. In each artists’ practice we find individual pieces, existing as their own autonomous and self reliant works, but placed together they create a vista where each part coexist, and continuously inform each other and us.

Historically, an island is separated from the outside world, and has been the premier spot that enables us to research and scrutinize natural development within an eco-system where no outside forces have altered the natural habitat, and where you can compare the development on the island to that of the mainland. Similarly—and also the complete opposite—when we build an island we are faced with all that is contemporary landscape; both as autonomous parts and a collective whole. Through this endeavor we are able to critically engage with contemporary society, see resemblances, developments, and ourselves as a part of this system, and in Sculptural Landscape we have all the makings of an island, an island that asks us to reconsider landscape as a medium, but also photography. From the deepest sea to the digital space the vista presented to us in Sculptural Landscape is an island worthy, where building, shaping, understanding, and scrutiny is a collective endeavor involving both the artist and you as a spectator.

Kilde: Photo City