Victoria Ahrens
Liminal Dialogues: Landscapes of Nostalgia and Ruin.
Arkadia (2013/14) –photographs at the edges of liminal dialogue. Fragmented film stills transferred onto Japanese paper. 5 meters – 3 meters.
- Creates photo etchings – press transferred collage installations (prints and film projections and between the two) – interrogate and interrupt the physical plain and create a new narrative from the fragments.
- Hito Steyerl, writer about new media (she does media/video works) (the pull image) how modern day imagery can be portrayed.
- Her images are affected by her reading and manipulation.
- Revisiting images of her childhood and looking at political, liminal spaces that show borders and layers of history or permanently altered or reshaped by history/politics. Also where myths about nation building and geographical borders collide.
- Film footage from the bottom of a volcano between 2 borders and site of sacrificial burials.
- Nostalgia for the light – Patricio Guzman (experimental film)
- The sublime – (1744 Edmund Burke, the beautiful and the sublime) feeling the sense of their smallness travelling the world, She sees it as a pause.
Haptic and Optic. Haptic is to do with the texture or we can feel with our eyes and optic is purely visual.
The haptic is in a privileged position when printing. Mixing printmaking and digital could have a contemporary relationship?
The lost exploitation journals
- Geological or cartographic reference at the bottom. Something that you can discover if you’re interested in or just look at for visual aesthetic.
- Printmaking can be commercial and lives between different states. Images of places that are disappearing or re-appearing and portraying it through an old fashioned style newspaper.
- Newspapers created a almost geographical narrative as people took papers away causing ‘erosion’.
While researching she found a lost album of faded analogue photographs of her grandfather. She wanted to create a material dialogue from the encounter with the river in the photograph. She took out the image of the men in the image and turned it into a landscape and used that as her work.
It’s such a sad river she created a word Recordis so she re-used these images by re-birthing them and creates an open ended conversation and still waiting response.
She took photo-etching plates and exposed them in the sun by the river so the images were fixed onto this plate. You need water and acid to reveal the image so she used the polluted water of the river etching them in their physical context. Every image erodes the image further and further. Durability and permanence.
Naipi and Taroba (2013)
- Make her own paper and develop it by the polluted rivers Parana. Live in a boat house.
- That doesn’t exist anymore.
- Mythical stories involved with her prints.
- Turned the footage of this waterfall into an installation
- Reversed the waterfall (going back to its source)
- Turned the film stills into an installation sculpture (The Fall 2014)
Casper’s Forest (2013)
- Transfer prints of trees that have been eaten by acid rain and the acid has been used in making the image.
- How to display this, she took a book from Camberwell and worked with images from the book. One print and one page from a book.
Discourse
Memory
Nostalgia
The Anthropocene is an informal geologic chronological term for the proposed epoch that began when human activities had a significant global impact on the Earth’s ecosystems.
Ahrens, V. (2014). Akardas. [image] Available at: http://victoriaahrens.com/page/5/ [Accessed 11 Nov. 2014].
Robert Reynolds: Research and Works 