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Toxic
In Toxic subject and object merge, allowing what is photographed to infiltrate and alter the image. After capturing the boulders used as memorial stones for the excavated or buried villages in Lusatia in her series KOHLE, Schuurman continued her research in the region and on the effects of open-pit lignite mining on the landscape. The mining industry left deep craters in the natural environment. Often these abysses are filled with water to create opportunities for future tourism. The water is currently still too acidic to sustain life. Schuurman took polaroids of the surface of these man-made toxic lakes and let the image develop inside the water. The different PH levels of the water, interacting with the acids of the Polaroids themselves, allowed a variety of shapes and colors to emerge: A visual manifestation of the un-naturalness of water. Presented in plexiglass boxes, Schuurman emphasizes the „untouchability“ of her source material.
Flashback
For Flashback Schuurman addresses the aftermath of the act of taking a photograph.
Magnified images of blown-out or defective flashbulbs allow us to look closer at the potentially destructive power of light.
The smooth glass surface becomes mangled with bulbous discoloration, while wires are tangled inside.
The image captured with the bulbs is discarded. Schuurman focuses instead on the process, highlighting the transformation and destruction behind the photograph.
Self-portrait of a Photo Booth
Schuurman causes 23 different passport photo booths to photograph themselves by throwing two euros into the coin slot and waiting outside until the photos have been taken and rolled out of the machines.
KOHLE
KOHLE highlights the social and environmental consequences of lignite mining in the former GDR. Many villages in Lusatia were demolished, communities destroyed and craters left behind without any public participation. These interventions caused not only physical damage, but also social wounds.
The memorial stones that Schuurman photographed clearly manifest both a very distant and at the same time very recent past. They connect the most divergent periods of time and history and, as silent witnesses, serve as a reminder of that which is now history, which has disappeared and is now lying just below the surface.
This is exactly the point where Marike Schuurman applies her particular technique within this work group: she uses a no-longer-produced “peel-apart” instant film, which provides the standard colour-positive image, which for her needs is no longer relevant. Instead, the artist works with the initially almost invisible negative found on the black part of the film which has to be revealed by using an ordinary bleach. This negative is then scanned with transmitted light and printed. This specific method allows the photographs to appear somewhat washed out and yellow on the colour scale. First and foremost, these photographic works reference that which is missing, that which no longer exists.
Automat
Marike Schuurman’s series ‘Automat’ shows the interior of a booth, in which for a modest sum one could traditionally make passport photos and other photographs, which then after a certain amount of developing time would emerge from a slot. The artist took photographs using a polaroid camera – which corresponds to the technical process employed in the photo booths – of the swivel stools on which one sits for the photographs, at the various heights one needs to set according to one’s body height to be in the image properly.
Marike Schuurman, however, does not show us the polaroid photographs, she has in fact bleached the negatives from which the photos are pulled off, and produced strongly enlarged photographs from these. Unlike in conventional negatives or digital files, neither grains nor pixels appear because the basis is solely a chemical emulsion. The image definition and distorted colour range automatically lends the photographs the appearance of having been made in the 1960’s or 1970’s. The look into the photo booth thus turns into a look into the photographical laboratory, into a reflection upon how the manufacturing process of a photo is more decisive than the motif itself
Expired
Since 2007, a ‚Clean City Law‘ has existed in São Paulo, prohibiting all advertising in public spaces. For ‚Expired‘, Schuurman uses old expired polaroid film to photograph the advertising-free city of São Paulo.
Every snapshot made with the SX-70 Polaroid camera results in one abstract picture after another, without any reference to what the camera has been aimed at. As if the old lens and the long expired film – one of the last available ones for this medium, threatened by extinction –, with a view of an entire city without any visual noise or clues, had been hit by a final blackout. The deliquescent, exquisitely colourful images, destroyed by time and saturated by the chemicals in the instant camera, are mysterious commentaries on their own disappearance.
Blown up into a large format, due to the lack of film grain in the Polaroids, they have kept their smooth depth. The film Schuurman uses is called “Time Zero”, as if it were announcing its own zero point right from the start.
