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Extensions tap into the vibrant, glossy realm of fashion and style. Wall mounted hair sculptures depict scenery and details from a tropical adventure. The thin, dry, almost transparent prints move with the slightest breath. The title is descriptive, yet it plays with the notion of social positioning and building one’s identity by wearing your experiences and exposing the moments as a status marker through one’s body. Not only a hair extension in its most concrete sense but an identity extension that reveals who we want to be.
The photographic sculptures Sunset Photography consist of landscapes and sunsets solidified in a state of wetness. Browsing through their photographic catalog Inka and Niclas picked out the panoramas they photographed on impulse, never to be looked at again. The digital waste that fills up our phones, is here used as a raw material. The glass-like, slimy creases of the sculptures hide and obscure. Only parts of the scenery are visible to us, yet it is easy to fill in the blanks, the image has been produced, shared, and seen so many times before.
Family Portraits is a collection of self-portraits taken during the artists, and their two children’s, travels to idyllic panoramic settings across the world. It is a continuous investigation of how we perceive and save our memory of nature through the mediated picture, but also how we use the mediation of nature for self-identification. “I ́m one with nature, you can see it on my Instagram account”.
All dressed up in full body suits that bounce the light of the flash back into the camera lens, the shapes of what we read as a family constellation indicate anonymity. As with many photographs throughout history, these images serve as evidence that four bodies were present in the scenery. Simultaneously we experience the four individual’s absence in the photographs as their features are erased – like radiant phantoms waiting to transcend to another dimension. The role of nature as an enduring source to idealization remains untouched.
Abstracting the ordinary and enabling tools to the photographic image and its psychological mechanisms has been an important feature throughout Inka & Niclas’ work. In the series Liquify, the seemingly collapsed photographs have been placed on the wall, as if wet towels hung to dry. Their glass-like surface suggests a materiality more alluring than the mundane shape. It seems as though gravity has decided their form. A complete understanding of the medium proves to be difficult, as the objects are substantially manipulated into new materia in their own right.
Parts of the romantic scenery are visible, and we can only imagine the beauty of the initial image, while we are deprived of the complete motif. The viewer is thus invited to fill the void with his or her own desires and ideas of the perfect shot.
The starting point for the duo again lies in the common natural themes that our cameras seems to like, but in Luminous Matter the artist has zoomed in, both in terms of actual subject matter but also geographically. Where the duos earlier works have been situated predominantly in large scale grand scenery abroad, Luminous Matter depicts swedish wild flowers found in close proximity to the artists home in Stockholm.
The inflated title points far out in cosmos and eternity, contrasting the small short lived swedish roadside summer flowers. By throwing retro reflective powder into the scene, illuminating it with the flashgun, the artists superimposes an explosion of glowing particles resembling popular space imagery, common astrophotography or an exploding nebula from the NASA archives.
4K ULTRA HD
4K Ultra HD deals with our consumption of landscapes through (camera-)lenses and screens. Our image of the landscape is formed by photography and nature is constructed by the stream of images on our screens. The photographic works and installations of the exhibition focus on the “4K ULTRA HD” image search, terms used in the display industry to illustrate that their screens have a True-to-life picture quality.
Search algorithms list the most popular images in descending order and define which images we like to surround ourselves with, which images we download and save as desktop background on our computers.
“-It’s scrambled and amplified reworkings of the already overly-saturated landscape imagery we like to surround us with.”
The artist duo travels together, seeking places to continue their practice of creating a different representation of nature, using the photographic image to capture their landscapes.
Integral to their practice is the wish to consider what it is in a sunset over an ocean or the view of a mountain range that is so emotionally spellbinding and continues to fill us with awe? What is it that drives us to go out there and collect these images over and over again.
Inka & Niclas’ practice evolves around an exploration of the different components that constitute the powerful psychological effects of different natural phenomena and landscapes.
By performing small actions in consonance with nature during the exposure, such as arranging branches, throwing reflective powder to the wind or illuminating a cave with color flashes the duo detaches the photographic reality from the physical.
The series of sculptures recur throughout the artists exhibitions, their form and shape depending on what work is hanging on the wall.
The objects are hand sculpted and dipped into a dissolved floating version of the photograph, transferring the photograph onto the object’s surface, making a 3 dimensional fragmented version of the very same photograph.
“For us the whole process with the digital origin of the photographic file and the very analog muscle straining process of shaping-sanding and painting the objects, along with the poetic act of physically dipping the object into the photograph, are interesting enough. But it’s also of course an exploration on the materiality and readability of photographs.
For us the objects in the room bring energy as it somehow questions the very same photograph it has been dipped into and now mimics”.
“It was the fourth time for us driving through US, ticking of the superstars of scenic views one by one. There were heaps cameras and phones everywhere and a constant sound of shutters and digital clicks. After a while it started to feel like all the lenses were wearing out the landscape, that somehow the views were slowly eroding from all the thousands of exposures that were made everyday. We started to question why we should add another photograph to this growing pile of random landscape photography.
So we glued the quarter coin, the same coin that you put in the tower viewers at the famous lookout points „Vista Points“, as an act of violence on the landscape photographs. Photographs that didn’t need to be taken.”
The series consists of eight images of rocks in the shoreline dripping with lush colours and with the open horizon as their backdrop. For a moment the sunset left the sky and moved into these rocks. It is not an experience recorded with the eye but the migration of the colors has, through the testimony of the camera, been registered into a new corner of our reality. Every different rock is photographed in a new sunset. Obviously, the endeavor is not to recreate an actual sunset, instead the work lies in the time consuming and persistent process of repeatedly approaching and deconstructing its magical effects.
The title is based on the actual atmospheric phenomenons that are visible in a sunset or sunrise. The Shadow of the Earth (or The Earth’s shadow) is visible in the opposite half of the sky to the sunset or sunrise, and is seen right above the horizon as a dark blue band. The Belt of Venus is a pink band that is visible above the dark blue of The Shadow of the Earth, in the same part of the sky.
While working on Watching Humans Watching, 2008-2010, Inka and Niclas began to contemplate their own mystification with nature, which is influenced by fairy tales and myths. In the series, Saga (fairy tale) 2009-2011, the images have been taken in almost the same places as those featured in Watching Humans Watching. Yet in Saga practically every element of the image is predetermined. Here, the artists themselves have intervened in nature through the coloring or addition of objects, and through experimentation with smoke bombs and filters. In the process, they have dispensed with digital post-production.
Groups and couples, the subjects of their first series Watching Humans Watching, are pictured moving in seemingly predetermined formations and patterns. They dress in clothing, which attempts to imitate the colors of their unfamiliar surroundings. The artist couple observes from a distance, as if they were photographing rare animals. „Even if we take pictures of people in the countryside, we see them much as we would see lions and zebras. The human (Homo sapiens) travels now more than ever before, frantically looking for something that has not yet been destroyed. In the desert, far from their original habitat, they make formations reminiscent of penguins in the Antarctic.“