PHOTO:Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács

Margit Lukács & Persijn Broersen are artists living and working in Amsterdam. They work in a wide variety of media, most notably video, animation and graphics producing a myriad of works that reflect on the depiction of nature in our increasingly virtual society. With intricate layers of (filmed) footage, digital animation and images appropriated from the media they demonstrate how reality, mass media and fiction are strongly intertwined in contemporary culture.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Foam Archive

The exhibition of the artist duo Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács “Point Cloud, Old Growth” is part of the Foam’s series “Next Level”. The subject of their exhibition is the human perception of nature: as a sublime background decor, as a political plaything, or as a historic-cultural concept. The title, “Point Cloud, Old Growth”, refers to the relations between time and space, replica and reality, and between life and death and virtual eternalisation. “Point Cloud” is a concept used in 3D software to denote a cloud composed of a huge number of minute dots (data), together forming a replica of an existing object.  “Old Growth” refers to primeval forest, which is the subject investigated in the duo’s latest work, “Forest On Location”. For this project, the artists travelled to Poland to document Białowieża Forest, Europe’s last and now threatened primeval forest. Using 3D photography, they documented parts of the forest to create a virtual model of this rapidly shrinking wilderness. The virtual forest serves as the foundation for a series of new works commissioned by Foam. In a three-part installation of sculptures and projections, Białowieża Forest is examined as a construction of the human imagination. 3D photography is used to create digital renders, presented in the exhibition as video works, 3D printed sculptures and digital animations. In these works, images are continuously constructed and dissected, to shed light on the simulation of reality and the neurological effect of perception. Photography underlies the various media and techniques used by the artists, but it is never the final product. This work method and choice of tools goes hand in hand with a view of reality in which simulation takes the place of representation. In the duo’s work, photography as a direct reflection of the real world becomes a material that can be deconstructed and reshaped into new perceptions of reality. The works displayed in the exhibition were created in collaboration with the Iranian opera singer Shahram Yazdani and the musicians Berend Dubbe and Gwendolyn Thomas. They composed and performed music specially for the exhibition. In “Establishing Eden” (2016) Broersen & Lukács focus on the establishing shot: the moment a landscape is identified and becomes one of the main protagonists in a film. In blockbuster like “Avatar” (2009) and the film series “Lord of the Rings” (2001-14), these shots have been used to capture and confiscate the nature of New Zealand, propagating itself as a new Eden, ever-green and unspoilt. Here, fiction takes over reality: mountains and forests exist under the name of their cinematic alter-ego’s. The artists travelled through the wilderness of New Zealand to capture these landscapes, and with that, they appropriate the nature of New Zealand once again.  Creating an architecture of fragments connected by the camera-movement of a perpetual establishing shot, they show this Eden as a series of many possible realities, an illusion that just as easily comes together as it falls apart.

Info: Foam Fotografiemuseum, Keizersgracht 609, Amsterdam, Duration: 23/11/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Wed & Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu-Fri 10:00-21:00, www.foam.org